MOSCOW, November 10. /TASS/. A team of Russian military physicians performed a unique surgical operation to retrieve an unexploded shell from the chest of a soldier seriously injured in the Ukraine operation, Russia’s Defense Ministry reported on Thursday.
A team of surgeons from the Central Military District’s Mandryk Central Military Clinical Hospital operated on junior sergeant Nikolay Pasenko on the premises of a local outpatient clinic in the Belgorod Region, the ministry said.
"The patient was admitted with a wound that had penetrated [his] chest. The examination revealed that the miraculously unexploded ordnance had pierced [his] ribs and lungs and got lodged close to the spinal cord, between the aorta and the inferior vena cava near the heart," the statement specified.
The risk of the munition’s detonation was extremely high. "Despite this, the military doctors together with their civilian counterparts donned body armor under their medical gowns and proceeded with this utmost intricate surgery," the ministry stressed.
Medical Corps Lieutenant-Colonel Dmitry Kim from the Mandryk Central Military Clinical Hospital who carried out this one-of-a-kind surgical operation said that the patient had to be operated on local premises due to the risk of fatal bleeding.
"The unexploded shell was stuck between the aorta and the inferior vena cava close to the heart, which could have caused fatal bleeding even without the ordnance’s detonation. A decision was made to carry out the surgery locally," he explained.
After the surgery, junior sergeant Pasenko was delivered to Moscow. He is currently undergoing treatment and recovery at the Mandryk Central Military Clinical Hospital.
"The surgeon ventured to perform the operation, I was against it. I did not want the doctors to suffer as the munition could have exploded. The surgeons put on body armor vests. And now you see that I am sitting in front of you. My thanks to surgeon Dmitry Kim and I will be grateful to him for the rest of my life. He replied: ‘So, we will explode together.’ That’s it. He is a very courageous man," Pasenko said.
As the Russian Defense Ministry specified, the Russian unit, in which junior sergeant Nikolay Pasenko served, was ambushed in the special military operation zone in Ukraine. Under the heavy enemy fire, the junior sergeant dismounted an infantry fighting vehicle and opened retaliatory fire. After hearing an explosion, he felt a powerful blow to his side and pain. After that, he was evacuated and delivered to a medical center.