In brief: Ukraine has approved rules for State Emergency Service aircraft to transfer patients between hospitals and take them abroad for specialist care. Crews will also be able to carry transplant teams and donor organs when the journey by road would take too long.
Ukraine plans to resume medical evacuation flights by the end of 2026, Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi said on Friday, Nov. 6. The government approved rules allowing State Emergency Service aircraft to move patients between Ukrainian hospitals and take them abroad for urgent specialist treatment.
Koretskyi cited the journey from Kharkiv to the medical evacuation hub in Rzeszów, Poland. A patient can spend 15 to 16 hours on the road before reaching the Polish hub, where medical staff prepare patients for the next leg of their journey. An aircraft could cover the distance from Kharkiv in two to three hours, he said.
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“For patients in serious condition, every hour matters,” Koretskyi wrote on Telegram. “Our task is to ensure they can receive the necessary medical care as quickly as possible.”
When patients and donor organs can travel by air
Hospitals will be able to use air transfers when a road journey would take too long, be difficult to arrange or put a patient’s health at risk, according to the Interior Ministry. The rules cover how to request an evacuation, approve a route and arrange for medical staff to accompany the patient.
The Health Ministry’s Ukrainian Scientific and Practical Center for Emergency Medical Care and Disaster Medicine will coordinate each transfer with hospitals and emergency crews. The State Emergency Service will assess whether the flight can go ahead given the weather and security conditions, and will provide the aircraft and crew. Ukraine has kept its airspace closed to commercial passenger flights since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
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For transplant teams, the rules set specific thresholds. An aircraft can carry a donor heart if the road journey would take more than two hours. For a liver or lungs, the threshold is five hours. Crews can also fly the doctors who retrieve the organs, along with their equipment.
The flights will build on an existing Ukrainian system that takes people injured in the war directly to a hospital with the specialists and equipment to treat them. This spares patients an intermediate hospital stop and another transfer. The Interior Ministry said Ukraine had already carried out more than 3,700 such evacuations.
What happens after patients reach Poland
For Ukrainians referred abroad through the Medevac Ukraine program, reaching Poland is often only part of the journey. The EU opened the Rzeszów hub in September 2022. Patients arriving overland from Ukraine can receive treatment and round-the-clock nursing care there before flying to a hospital elsewhere in Europe. The new Ukrainian flights could shorten the first leg of that journey.
The European evacuation effort began in March 2022, when three Ukrainian children with chronic illnesses traveled from Poland to Italy with their relatives for treatment. By April 2026, more than 5,000 patients from Ukraine had reached hospitals in 22 European countries through the EU Civil Protection Mechanism, according to the European Commission.
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