In August 2024, the war in Ukraine had been raging for over two years. Besides following the developments from afar, Suresh Mohan, MD, a facial plastic and reconstructive surgeon at Yale School of Medicine, felt little personal connection to the country. But that changed when a group of surgeons from Ukraine visited Mohan’s operating room at Yale New Haven Hospital to observe advanced surgical techniques. For Mohan, their arrival and the time he spent with them hearing their stories connected him to the far-away conflict.
Less than a year later, in April, Mohan traveled to Lviv, Ukraine to treat war injuries and share his expertise.
He was prompted by an unexpected email in January 2025—an appeal for volunteers, like Mohan, with expertise in microvascular surgery to visit Lviv. Mohan had reservations; the trip could be dangerous, and it was coming up fast, scheduled for the spring. But he felt compelled to respond.
“As a physician, it's really hard to hear someone ask for help and say no,” he says.
One of the doctors helping coordinate the trip was Volodymyr Vovk, MD, PhD, a Ukrainian surgeon who had visited Yale in August and with whom Mohan stayed in touch. Soon enough, Mohan found himself on a planning committee messaging thread, where he connected with doctors who had been to Ukraine before. After getting the final word of approval from his spouse and kids, Mohan set his mind on the trip.
He returned in early May, having glimpsed life and medicine amidst war. Here’s his account of how the experience unfolded.
Thirteen surgeries over 4,000 miles away
The trip, funded by Doctors United for Ukraine—a non-profit formed by doctors at Yale that delivers medical aid—would be just eight days, during which Mohan would both perform surgeries and teach the surgeons in Lviv how to do them. He was to be hosted by Superhumans Center in Lviv, Ukraine, which specializes in treating and rehabilitating war victims with either extremity or facial trauma. For each of the 13 planned surgeries, the physicians in both countries had three to four Zoom calls, during which the surgeons in Lviv shared pictures and details of every case. Together, the doctors came up with detailed plans.
On April 25, having flown his parents from Ann Arbor, Mich. to his home in Connecticut to help his wife with childcare, and having gathered necessary surgical equipment, Mohan and two other facial plastic surgeons—Roman Bukachevsky, MD, from California and John Frodel, MD, from New York—flew to Krakow, Poland. From there, it was a three-hour journey by road across the Ukrainian border.
Driving into Lviv, Mohan was struck by signs of normal life peppered with unmistakable hints of the danger that lurked not far away. Even the ordinary experience of checking into the hotel reflected this, as Mohan recalls. “They said, here's where breakfast is, and here's the pool, and here's what you do if there's an air raid alert.” Mohan had to put that last piece of advice to use on night three.
Repairing complex bone damage
Over the eight days, Mohan worked with a team of surgeons on a total of 13 surgeries, reconstructing injured soldiers’ noses and lips. The two most complex cases involved soldiers who had lost parts of their jaws to explosive landmines.
To piece the jaws back together, the surgeons used parts of the soldiers’ fibula bones, taking a 20-centimeter section from the middle and leaving behind the ends to stabilize the knee and the ankle. They hewed the excised bone into the shape of the gap left by the injury. But just placing the new bone in the jaw is not sufficient; it won’t survive without blood flow, Mohan explains. That’s where his specialty in microvascular surgery paid off.
Peering through a microscope, armed with sutures the width of human hair, he sewed blood vessels from the leg bone—which can be as small as a few millimeters—to vessels in the face. It’s a complex, delicate procedure that requires steady hands and establishing connections between the right blood vessels, says Mohan. But it was a success.
“It's been a few weeks since the surgery, and both of the patients are continuing to do well,” he says.
To train the Ukrainian surgeons, Mohan had to work around significant language and cultural barriers, but in only a few days, he saw tremendous progress in their technical abilities.
During his short stay in Ukraine, Mohan remembers a sense of dread creeping into the everyday routine from a subconscious concern about safety. He found himself admiring Ukrainian health workers who show up “every single day, not worried about their own safety, focused on the task at hand and the people who need to be taken care of,” Mohan says.
He has a newfound appreciation for being able to treat patients without worrying about his safety. Even so, Mohan spent part of his last day in Lviv discussing the procedures he would perform on his next trip—which is planned for the fall.