Time running out for sick Ukrainian kids sheltering in hospital bunkers

The sickest children at some Ukrainian hospitals are living in bomb shelters with minimal supplies.

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues, pediatric hospital patients have gone underground, using hospital bunkers that were originally built for a different time.

Parents hold their children — some of them in treatment for cancer or awaiting cardiac surgery — while resting on thin mattresses on the floor. Several babies share a crib.

But medical supplies, including important chemotherapies, are dwindling and doctors and nurses are challenged with providing treatments without their usual access to important equipment.

“These children suffer more because they need to stay alive to fight with the cancer — and this fight cannot wait,” Dr. Lesia Lysytsia told NBC News over the phone from the basement of Okhmatdyt, the country’s largest children’s hospital, in Kyiv.

“If the childrens’ cancer treatment is interrupted further by the war, our patients, they will die,” she warned.

According to TIME magazine, most children have been evacuated from Okhmatdyt, but those with life-threatening illness must stay, for now. Several are on life support, or need long chemotherapy sessions for their cancer.

“The saddest thing is that when the siren sounds, we have to go down with the children and parents to the basement,” surgeon Vitaly Demidov told the publication.

“We run five or six times a day in the basement and back.”