A soldier is lucky to be alive after a live grenade was lodged in his torso during a bloody battle in Bakhmut, Ukraine — and needed to have it surgically removed.
Ukrainian surgeon Major General Andrii Verba needed to perform the surgery knowing the grenade could detonate at any second.
“Our military doctors performed an operation to remove an unexploded VOG grenade from the body of a serviceman,” confirmed regional governor Serhii Borzov in a Facebook post Monday night.
The VOG grenade was fired from a grenade launcher attached to an assault rifle — and the operation was performed in the corporate of two other soldiers on account of the specter of an explosion.
An electrocoagulation — a surgery that uses heat to regulate bleeding and destroy abnormal tissue — couldn’t be conducted because it’d trigger the grenade.
Nonetheless, Dr. Verba was in a position to successfully perform the surgery and take away the grenade, Borzov said.
“The operational intervention was successful” Borzov added, “and the injured soldier was sent to further rehabilitation and recovery.”
Dr. Verba, one in every of Ukraine’s “most experienced surgeons,” has been based within the Donbas region since 2014, the Every day Mail reported. He was granted the state awards of Honored Doctor of Ukraine and Doctor of Medical Sciences and has led hundreds of field operations.
The removal of the live grenade comes as Russia continues its invasion of Ukraine and considers calling up one other 500,000 troops.
Russian troops are stepping up their assault on Soledar — a small salt mining town five miles northeast of Bakhmut — where the fighting has been particularly brutal, forcing Ukraine to send reinforcements to counter Russian assaults.
“The enemy again made a desperate try and storm town of Soledar from different directions and threw essentially the most skilled units of the Wagnerites into battle,” the Ukrainian military said in a press release.
Bakhmut has been the main focus of Russian efforts for months, spearheaded by the Wagner Group — a quasi-state paramilitary group financed by Oligarch and Putin crony Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Malyar said Monday that Wagner has thrown waves of troops at Soledar, despite a successful defense by Ukrainian forces.
“The enemy literally step over the corpses of their very own soldiers, using massed artillery, MLRS systems and mortars,” she said.
Meanwhile, a whole lot of Ukrainian children have been unable to go away Russian-run summer camps in Crimea for months on account of the continuing war between the 2 countries.
Parents are growing increasingly concerned concerning the missing children, who some imagine Russia desires to assimilate to its cause or use for prisoner exchanges, The Guardian reported earlier this week.