Wounds of War: Part 4 – Survivors of fighting left with lasting emotional and physical scars

By John Grinvalds

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    NEBRASKA (KETV) — The war seems distant in Lviv and other parts of western Ukraine until you see the cemeteries. Forests of yellow and blue flags wave in the wind over the graves of the slain.

“This is the price of freedom,” military chaplain Gennadiy Mokhnenko said. “So, so many lives. Imagine all the children without fathers. All the parents without sons.”

Kyiv’s Maidan Square is similarly somber, with thousands of those flags packed into a green space. The eyes can get lost in the immensity of death. Each flag is a life, a story. One woman shared her brother’s, bound together in a book in his honor.

“His death, this is part of the victory that moves us forward to that final destination, to freedom,” she said.

In war, the body becomes bound by geopolitics. It doesn’t just steal the future; it muddles the past. Who tends to the graves in occupied land? Mokhenko’s family is buried in captured Mariupol.

“I can’t do it for yes, for my father, for my mother,” he said. “[The Russians] steal my memory. They steal my family history. They steal my childhood.”

The survivors are marred by physical and emotional pain. Experts in the field of amputation and rehabilitation said roughly 100,000 people will forever carry the wounds of the war on their bodies in the form of missing limbs and digits.

At Tytanovi Rehabilitation Center in Ukraine, the boxers have one arm.

“This was my leading hand,” Khyrstian, a wounded veteran, said, pointing to his amputation. “Now I have to re-train myself to the right stance.”

The archers use their teeth. They have friendly competitions, angling for medals and for something to keep their minds on. At Tytanovi, the scarred come for replacement limbs and rehabilitation, learning to move again as they grapple with the despair of losing a piece of themselves.

“The first two months was very depressive,” Alex, a wounded veteran, said. “Obviously, have to wrestle with a lot of thoughts, how to live and how to adapt to this.”

They form a brotherhood of the broken, building each other up together.

“You understand that you’re in a circle of friends, and there is so many of you, around you, like you,” Bogdan, a wounded vet, said. “This is such a good circle.”

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