The heart institute said that 23 heart transplants have been performed in Ukraine this year.
A six-year-old girl underwent a successful heart transplant in war-torn Ukraine where Russian missile post a constant threat. Quoting the Heart Institute of Ukraine's Ministry of Health, CNN said that the surgery was carried out in capital Kyiv on Sunday evening. The operation lasted for three hours during which the girl was given the heart of a four-year-old boy, whom doctors had declared brain dead after suffering an aneurysm, a bulge or ballooning in a blood vessel, the outlet further reported.
This is the first time that a heart transplant surgery has been performed on a child so young, the institute was further quoted as saying by CNN.
"The operation was also unique in that both the donor and the recipient were very young children, and the transplant required more effort from the doctors," it added.
Before this, a similar medical procedure was carried out on a 13-year-old boy from the Volyn region in 2021.
Sunday's surgery was performed by a team of doctors led by Dr Boris Todurov, the chief scientist of the department of surgical and minimally invasive treatment, the CNN report said.
"The operation went smoothly, the girl was extubated two hours after the operation," The doctor said in a Facebook post, as per the outlet.
The Heart Institute released images from the surgery that showed the mother of the boy whose heart was donated standing by the girl's bedside.
"It is extremely touching that the mother of the deceased boy came to listen to her child's heart beating in the other chest ... I have tears in my eyes from this photo," Oksana Dmytrieva, chairman of the Ukrainian Parliament's subcommittee on modern medical technologies and transplantation development, said on Facebook.
The institute further said that 23 heart transplants have been performed in Ukraine this year amid this war.