The hospital in the small Ukrainian town of Bakhmut was never intended to receive queues of ambulances bringing the wounded and traumatized from the front line of Europe¡¯s biggest battlefield.

Nor did the volunteer paramedics expect, four months ago, to be shuttling back and forth to the front line of a brutal tank battle, within earshot of rockets and shelling.

¡°I haven¡¯t seen so much human tragedy before. Absolutely unnecessary suffering,¡± said Elena Bulakhtina, a Russian-born Canadian medic who joined the Pirogov First Volunteer Mobile Hospital, a group of civilian health care professionals dedicated to providing medical care on the front line.