After refusing to sign a loyalty oath, the director of the establishment found himself in prison. In the city now released from the Russians, he tells, with his assistant, their daily life his last eight months.
by Rémy Ourdan (Kherson (Ukraine), Special Envoy)
The chances of war upset lives and sometimes overturn roles. This is how Leonid Remiga passed, one day in June, from chief doctor to patient in his own hospital, then, in September, from prisoner to caregiver in the jail where the Russian security services had imprisoned him . From Tropinka Hospital to prison on 3, rue Tondplogenerhetikiv, he was one of the privileged witnesses of the Russian military occupation of Kherson.
In the life of the chief doctor and managing director of the Tropinka hospital, there were two periods in the occupation, from March 2 to November 11, of the city of southern Ukraine. During the first phase, relatively peaceful, he remained at the head of the hospital. “We were treating the wounded, mainly civilians, as well as some Russian soldiers,” recalls Doctor Remiga. The most delicate for him was to keep the link with the Ukrainian government in kyiv. “We communicated by signal messaging, without the Russians realizing it.”
The director of the hospital even manages to sign, each month, the administrative documents allowing staff to receive, on their credit card, their Ukrainian salary. At the time, the automatic distributors of Ukrainian banks still operate in the occupied city. The chief nurse and assistant director of the hospital, Larissa Maleta, succeeds in protecting the director, who works discreetly on the first floor, systematically welcoming Russian visitors on the ground floor. “We played a game, she smiles. To him the relationships with kyiv, to me those with the Russians.”
“Courage and integrity”
Their life changes on June 7. The Russian occupier then calls “prorusian collaborators” – as Leonid Remiga and Larissa Maleta – head of the Health Department of the Kherson region call them. “To be honest, the Russian soldiers behaved better with us than these collaborators of Kherson, who had nevertheless worked by our side for years, notes, disappointed, the chief doctor. They arrived saying:” Russia is Here forever. Sooner or later, we will have to collaborate. “”
Accompanied by FSB agents, the Russian interior secret services, they ask the director to sign an oath of loyalty to the occupation authority. “I told them that I would not sign,” he says, “and that they could kill me if they wanted it.”
Doctor Remiga is then taken unremated and, outside, when he passed his handcuffs, he makes a vagal discomfort. Back in the hospital, this time as a patient. “I stayed almost two months in my hospital room, he said. The Russians said to the doctors:” Tell us as soon as he is on foot, we have to take him! “So my comrades were lying to the Russian and made the treatment last. “
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