Doctors help women give birth in bombarded Kharkiv

STORY: In a Kharkiv hospital basement, a new labor room has been set up to help Ukrainian women give birth, while the city above them remains under siege from Russian forces.

Medics here provide both routine and urgent services, from nursing tiny premature babies, to offering milk and food to both mother and child.

Director of Kharkiv Regional Perinatal Center, Iryna Kondratova, says the space also acts as a delivery and surgery room.

“Here you see, there was a birth in the morning, and there are still solutions left here. So we have arranged two places here, two births can take place at the same time, we have not had this in Ukraine for a long time, we have always had individual maternity rooms. But it is clear that in these conditions we all work in slightly extreme conditions.”

Kondratova says her staff have mostly stayed at the hospital since the beginning of the war.

Some have even brought family members to join them at the hospital.

“I just endlessly bow to all my staff who stayed here with me. Many of them have not been home all these 26 days. Many left without homes and brought their parents, wives and children here. One even brought their cat.”

Yana is just one of the women who has given birth in the makeshift labor room.

Holding her new baby, she says that her house has been bombed, and that they have nowhere else to go.

Kharkiv is just one of the cities under bombardment since Russia launched what it calls a "special operation" in Ukraine last month.

Kondratova briefly took over former England soccer star David Beckham's Instagram account this week to help raise awareness and bring in funds to their operation.