Ireland is a small island with a generous heart
At just two-and-a-half months old, Maxim Phillipov doesn’t know it yet, but some day in the future someone, perhaps his mother Victoria or his father Sergey, will tell him that in the spring of 2015 a group of Irish people decided that he shouldn’t be allowed to die. That as civil war still threatened to tear his country apart, they raised the money and flew a team of cardiac surgeons to Eastern Ukraine to fight to save his life.
They had heard about Maxim after a desperate plea for help from his parents and from doctors at Kharkiv General Hospital; the hospital was, just before Christmas, being overwhelmed by half a million refugees from the nearby self-proclaimed pro-Russian Donetsk People’s Republic.
