Last Ukraine doctors offer lifeline in shell-ridden Bakhmut

BAKHMUT, Ukraine – At a health centre in the frontline Ukraine city of Bakhmut, doctor Elena Molchanova ushers patients into a narrow office warmed by a wood-burning stove, where she hands out medication and fills in death certificates.

Sometimes her visitors — the last remaining residents in the town shelled daily and cut from essential services — are just seeking shelter from the biting cold.

The 40-year-old doctor is one of just five left in Bakhmut who are now a lifeline to the some 8,000 people local officials say are still in the city.

Bakhmut has been at the heart of a grinding fight between Russian and Ukrainian forces in the past few months in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region that Moscow wants to control fully.

When the city was bustling with its pre-war population of some 70,000, the hallways of Molchanova’s clinic were lit, the toilet running and the welcome desk staffed.

Now, she keeps to the one office, with haphazard stacks of medical equi