In US hospital, maimed Ukrainian soldiers bear war's terrible cost

New Straits Times

15-05-2025

RUSSIA'S war in Ukraine left Oleksandr Vikhruk without both arms and his right leg. Maksym Radiuk lost his left arm, his eyesight and was badly burned.
Now, through pain and sweat, Oleksandr, 45, works with US doctors to one day go fishing using prosthetic limbs. Maksym, 23, hopes the treatment will make him fit to join Ukraine's national football team for the blind.
As the world awaits what promises to be the first direct negotiations Thursday in Turkiye between Moscow and Kyiv since the early months of the Russian invasion in 2022, the two badly injured Ukrainian soldiers being treated at an elite US military hospital outside Washington embody the tremendous cost of the war for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian servicemen and their families.
"It's very painful, very scary to see your husband maimed," Oleksandr's wife Olha, 50, said, choking back tears.
"I couldn't speak without tears. I couldn't live. For three months, I didn't speak to almost anybody, except the kids."
She added: "It's a terrible, horrible war. I cannot describe it."
Oleksandr was wounded in March 2023, when his infantry unit was ambushed by Russian drones in the eastern Donetsk region. Gravely wounded, Oleksandr applied tourniquets to his arms and leg, but had to wait 10 hours to get medical help because the evacuation route was under attack by Russian forces.
"When I was in a lot of pain, I simply thought about something pleasant: my home, my wife, my children," Oleksandr, wearing a traditional Ukrainian embroidered shirt and sitting in a wheelchair in the office of United Help Ukraine, a charity that covered the families' non-medical expenses during treatment.
As hours passed, Oleksandr's body started shivering violently and he thought back to the time when he visited Marseille in southern France.
"I imagined the sea and I started feeling warm. I plunged into my dreams, that's how I was able to endure it," Oleksandr said in a weak voice, his eyes reflecting the traumatic memories.
When he was finally taken to hospital, his arms and leg had to be amputated and he spent 2.5 months in a medical coma. Later, he also suffered a cardiac arrest and a stroke – doctors said it was a miracle he survived.
Olha was devastated, but eventually seeing how Oleksandr's eyes would light up when he saw her entering his intensive care unit gave her strength.
"You begin to get used to this pain, to the idea that you must go on living, that life continues," said Olha, a soft-spoken brunette, also clad in a Ukrainian shirt.
"We fought together," she added. "I would tell him, Sasha, you will live, I believe in you, we are together, we will get through this. And we did."
In April 2024, Maksym's territorial defence unit was serving in the southern Kherson region, when a Russian drone exploded near his face. It destroyed his right eye, blew off his left arm and several fingers and set him on fire.
Because of the shock, Maksym initially didn't feel any pain as he waited to be evacuated, but his legs were so badly burnt that it felt like he was wearing shorts.
"I completely dissociated and just sat and waited and didn't think about anything," Maksym recalled, wearing sunglasses and sitting in a wheelchair.
Maksym spent one and a half months in a medically induced coma after doctors amputated the remains of his arm.
His wounds were so severe that his mother Natalia, 40, herself a servicewoman, was told that Maksym was unlikely to survive.
When Maksym finally came to, he couldn't see.
"He woke up and he asked me: how many eyes? I told him: one," said Natalia, adding that initially there was hope to save his left eye. "How many arms? I said: one. And legs? I said: two."
Natalia, who brims with energy, said she only allowed herself a couple of hours to cry.
"I decided that I will not help my child this way, that I need to pull myself together and move forward, forward, forward," she recalled.
"I will do everything so that he can return to normal life and he will show people with arms and legs and eyes what he can do."
The soldiers are scheduled to spend six months to a year at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center as part of a treatment plan paid for by the US Department of Defense.
Both should receive bionic limbs, and doctors have also offered to transplant one of Maxym's toes onto his right hand.
"I am very grateful that we were welcomed here in America, in this superb hospital, by superb professionals. They are great, they treat our guys very well, they treat them as heroes," said Natalia.
But with the talks scheduled in Turkiye, the families hold out little hope for any fair and lasting peace deal with Moscow and called on the international community to do more to support Ukraine.
"Everybody must rise up and scream that this war needs to be stopped," she added.