Alexander underwent just two weeks of training in Russia before being sent to the front lines in Ukraine in the summer of 2023. About a month later, his limbs were amputated.
It will take much longer than two weeks for him to be able to live without his right leg.
“At first it was very painful,” said 38-year-old Alexandre, who is referred to only by his first name in accordance with military protocol. But, he added, “eventually your brain rewires and you just get used to it.”
Alexander said in an interview as doctors refitted his prosthetic leg at a sanatorium on the outskirts of Moscow. He returns home from a third year of war to a parallel reality of government agencies and societies scrambling to provide for veterans under sanctions and the hustle and bustle of a seemingly untouched metropolis. One of hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers. and the hardships on the front lines.
Veterans have both tangible and intangible experiences that they bring back to their families. The family has gone through the trauma of waiting to be returned alive and now they must learn how to care for them.
According to calculations by Russian independent media outlets Mediazona, Meduza, and the BBC, the number of seriously injured veterans is at least 300,000. All of these media outlets rely on open source statistics to calculate the number of war deaths and injuries. Journalists say authorities have classified so many statistics since 2023, making it more difficult to estimate the number of seriously injured people.
After being deployed to the outskirts of Kupiansk, Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, Alexander said he was ordered to dig trenches in an area where recruits had laid land mines the previous day. It is not known whether the landmine he stepped on was from Ukraine or Russia, but he had to have his right leg amputated below the knee and spend six months going back and forth from hospital to hospital until he was fitted with a prosthetic leg.
He has returned to work as a welder in Russia and now endures 12-hour shifts, standing still, despite the recommendation that amputees not wear prosthetic legs for more than a few hours at a time. Still, he is grateful to be alive and considers himself lucky.
For the past year, the Rus Sanatorium, a medical-recreational resort where the former soldier was receiving treatment, has relied on materials imported from Germany, said Yuri A. Pogorelov, Alexander’s prosthetist and orthotist. It is said that approximately 100 prosthetic limbs have been made. Some domestic technologies. Only a handful of prosthetic legs were made for veterans of the Ukraine war.
The sanatorium was built during the Soviet era for the country’s political elite and offers a wide range of physical and psychological treatments. Veterans of all recent Russian wars and their relatives can visit for two weeks of rest and treatment each year. About 10% of the patrons are Ukrainian war veterans.
Late last year, the Russian government estimated that Russians would need a record 70,000 prosthetic legs a year, a significant increase. This number also includes civilian casualties and people who have lost limbs due to causes unrelated to the conflict. However, the Deputy Labor Minister estimated last year that: More than half of injured veterans They were amputees.
Alexandre said he was grateful for the free medical help he received, but stressed he was not suffering mentally.
“Thank God I was able to take care of my mental health in my own way,” he said. “I’ve survived every explosion and bombing ever, and I’m normal.”
But psychologists and experts say many veterans return home with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Everyone here has some degree of post-traumatic stress disorder, whether it’s an injury, a psychological trauma, or a family member who has lost a brother, a son, a father,” Andrei V. Colonel Demurenko, 69, said. Volunteer Brigade during the months-long Battle of Bahmut. In May 2023, after fracturing his skull, he returned to Moscow and found that psychological support for veterans was severely lacking.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have a system, at least not an orderly system built on an organized and understandable psychological recovery system,” he said.
Svetlana Artemeva, who is working on a project to train dozens of therapists in 16 regions of Russia to help soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress, is currently treating veterans and giving regular visits to them. He said there were not enough trained professionals to provide counseling. .
“We have to teach them how to live from scratch. They can’t sleep at night, so they have to re-learn how to sleep,” said the team, working with the nonprofit Special Military Operations Veterans Coalition. said Artemeva. “You don’t have to twitch, tremble, or be suspicious of everyone every time you make a rustling noise.”
At the Rus sanatorium, psychologist Elena Hamaganova said that all soldiers who fought in Ukraine undergo psychological tests on arrival, and then receive group and individual counseling. She cited the example of a recent patient, a veteran with a spinal cord injury who will have to urinate in a bag for the rest of his life, and said many will struggle with it for the rest of their lives. The man had a hard time being intimate with his wife. Despite having children, they were discussing divorce.
Veterans who leave the sanatorium can visit other centers, but are not eligible to return for at least a year. This means that you cannot continue to see the same mental health professional.
“Rehabilitation cannot end with two, 10 or even 15 visits to a psychologist,” Artemeva says. “A person’s rehabilitation must be lifelong, because the experience resonates throughout their life.”
Just convincing veterans to talk to therapists is a big part of this fight. A machine gunner from the western Kursk region, who gave his call sign Tuba, said he had had bad experiences with two therapists and did not want to talk anymore.
Tuba, 34, was sweating profusely and appeared upset during the interview. His mother and sister were against his choice to enlist in the military, and he was not in a romantic relationship. All he wanted, he said, was to heal his arm, injured by a drone in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya region, and return to his comrades in the trenches. He said he disliked the contrast between the harshness of life as a soldier and the decadence of big cities, where daily life seemed largely unaffected by combat.
“I didn’t meet a single Muscovite there,” he said mockingly of the front. “They’re busy with a concert, so that’s rude and out of place.”
Some civilians take a different view, citing examples of heinous crimes committed by returning military veterans, some of whom were freed former POWs who fought in Ukraine.
On a train from the western city of Rostov, a hub for soldiers traveling from the long front, women recently spoke of paying extra to sleep in a women-only compartment and being harassed by drunken veterans. They cited unpleasant experiences of sexual advances and inappropriate comments.
At the sanatorium, many soldiers who fought in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Chechen war said Russian society was more accepting of veterans than in previous conflicts. In Afghanistan, men have been mobilized and returned in coffins, mostly in secret, with the Kremlin trying to honor the new veterans with TV shows, billboards and special programs for leaders. This is in stark contrast to the way things have been done.
President Vladimir V. Putin has visited rehabilitation centers and instructed his subordinates to create more opportunities for wounded service members, a contrast experts say to previous Russian wars.
Pogorelov, the prosthetist who fitted Alexander’s prosthetic leg, said, “Many Afghan soldiers returned home with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but society as a whole didn’t have time for them, to say the least.” .
“The economy was devastated,” he said. “What kind of rehabilitation and pensions are there in a country that waits like manna from heaven for food donations from George Bush Sr.?”
But, like some veterans, he said Russia’s economy is much more stable than it was in the tumultuous 1980s and 1990s, and that civilians “go shopping even though the country is at war.” He said he is happy that he feels he is now able to do so.
Alexander was in a sanatorium with his father, Vyacheslav, who was injured in Afghanistan. While his father reiterated the Kremlin’s claims of Washington’s responsibility for the war in Ukraine, Alexander made it clear that he was not angry at Putin for losing his leg. Instead, they expressed their gratitude to the leader who has been at the helm of Russia for 25 years.
“Thankfully, we have President Putin,” Vyacheslav said, and his son nodded in agreement.
