On the menu today: Today’s newsletter will be a little abbreviated, as a long and exhausting trip nears its close.
‘I Have to Learn Again How to Walk’Kyiv, Ukraine — One of the three clinics of the Protez Foundation is just a bit off Euromaidan Square. Another is in western Ukraine, and the third is in Minneapolis, Minn. The foundation provides high-quality free prosthetics and therapy for Ukrainian veterans who have lost a limb. Veterans see and participate in the whole process of designing, building, and refining an artificial limb to enhance the sense that it is theirs, an extension of themselves.
Michael Vakhtomin, operations director for the foundation, explains that it is run entirely on private donations — no government funding from Ukraine or the U.S. government. So far, the organization has provided 750 prosthetics for about that same number of veterans and civilians; some patients require more than one.
The organization’s waiting list has more than 2,200 people on it.
At any given day, 20 veterans are being treated and outfitted for prosthetic limbs at the three facilities; manufacturing the limb takes up to five days, and patients have two to four weeks of practice and training, with additional follow up appointments for further refinement.
Michael says that 70 percent of their patients “want to return to the front line.” That may seem surprising, but to the wounded soldiers, their brothers-in-arms and their unit were a huge part of their identity and sense of community. Serving in the armed forces gave them a sense of purpose and mission, and they’re often itching to get back to that in some form — although when they return, they are often deployed to the second and third lines.
Andre lost a lower leg. I asked him how he lost it, and he answers simply, “war.” That was two years ago, and Andre is now back at the Protez clinic for adjustments. I asked him what caused the need for adjustments.
“Snowboarding,” he answered.
And then he showed me his pictures and videos on his cellphone. In a testament to the power of human will and the advances in prosthetic technology, Andre snowboards in his spare time, doing so with one artificial leg way better than most people can with the legs they’re born with. I marveled and told him I expect to see him on the Ukrainian Winter Paralympic team someday.
The veterans here are in surprisingly good spirits, perhaps because they’re taking steps, literally and metaphorically, toward recovery and a better life, and perhaps because they’re surrounded by fellow veterans who know exactly what they’re experiencing. When you see someone else do something that once seemed impossible, it probably makes that task seem a little less daunting for yourself.
I meet the massive Deniys, who appears to be functioning quite well on an artificial leg.
“I was on a mission, and I stepped on a mine,” Deniys said. “It’s still difficult for me to walk. I have to learn again how to walk. Four months, I was laying on a bed. So now it is a little challenging for me.”
Deniys still power lifts. “Before the trauma it was more often, but now, I see how I feel about it.” He lifts 120 kilograms, or about 264 pounds. He said that balance is the most difficult part of adjusting to his new artificial leg.
Deniys is one of three disabled soldiers I spoke to that day who said he was injured from a landmine.
In a development that undermines the global effort to ban landmines that has gone on for a generation, Ukraine is now called “the world’s largest minefield,” with an estimated 2 million mines scattered across its fields, forests, and communities. For the Russians, the landmines are a brutally effective tool for slowing or halting any Ukrainian counteroffensive; for the Ukrainians, landmines do the same to slow any Russian advances.
Last November, President Biden authorized sending U.S. land mines to Ukraine; then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the U.S. mines being provided “would self-activate, self-detonate and that makes it . . . far more safer eventually than the things that they are creating on their own.”
ADDENDUM: Over in that other Washington publication I write for, a visit to a hospital on Ukrainian territory that is treating little old Russian ladies from Kursk Oblast in Russia, who were injured in Russian air strikes and shelling.