Ukraine Dusts Off Ventilator Designs Found In Soviet-Era Factory

This is the abandoned Burevisnyk military factory in Kyiv. The site once produced medical ventilators for personnel wounded in the Soviet-Afghan war. The factory is owned by the state defense conglomerate Ukroboronprom.

The factory interior in a March 26 photo (the images in this gallery were released by Reuters on March 30). The last big government request for ventilators came in 2008, but payment for the order never arrived and the factory was shut down soon afterwards.

An abandoned workstation in the factory lays idle.
 
The site has the attention of Ukrainian officials again as the number of COVID-19 patients in Ukraine and elsewhere continues to rise. The coronavirus usually attacks patients’ lungs, rendering some unable to breathe without a ventilator.
 

The plant’s acting director, Vitaliy Khodzytskiy, looks at photos of ventilators in action.
 
In response to an urgent need for ventilators in Ukraine, some of the country’s wealthiest businessmen chipped in to buy machines from abroad. But defense officials are pushing for them to be made in Ukraine using technology developed at the Burevisnyk factory.
 

An official inside the Burevisnyk factory as his colleagues search for designs of the Soviet-era ventilators. The sign says: “Strengthen the union of science and production!”
 

Acting Director Khodzytskiy looks at old designs and instructions. A military official told Reuters that a computer with the relevant technical information had disappeared from the factory and the engineers that designed the ventilators were either retired or dead.

Rusting, dust-covered equipment sits abandoned inside the factory.
 
Eventually officials tracked down a man who knew where printouts for the designs were kept. He was working in a local supermarket.

Mustafa Nayyem, the deputy director general of Ukroboronprom, looks over ventilator designs retrieved from the Burevisnyk plant.

Nayyem told Reuters that the Burevisnyk plant is too decrepit to restart ventilator production but said, “We will give everyone access to this documentation because we understand that the crisis is now.”

The number of coronavirus cases in Ukraine has reached 549, with 13 deaths, as of March 31.