Alexander trained in Russia for just two weeks before being sent to the front line in Ukraine in the summer of 2023. About a month later, he was amputated.
It takes more than two weeks to learn to live without the left leg.
“At first there was a lot of pain,” said 38-year-old Alexander, who gave only his first name in accordance with military protocol. But, he added, “eventually, your brain just changes itself and you get used to it.”
Alexander spoke while a doctor was restoring his prosthetic leg at a sanatorium outside Moscow. He is one of hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers returning home from the war’s third year to the parallel realities of state institutions and society trying to provide for veterans amid sanctions and the seemingly unaffected bustle of big cities. and difficulties at the front.
Veterans have both visible and invisible needs as they return to their families, who have experienced the trauma of waiting for them to come home alive, and now must learn to care for them.
There are at least 300,000 seriously wounded veterans, according to independent Russian media outlets Mediazona and Meduza, as well as the BBC, which uses open-source statistics to estimate the number of war dead and wounded. Since 2023, officials have classified many statistics as confidential, making it difficult to estimate the number of seriously injured, the journalists said.
Alexander said after being sent On the outskirts of KupyanskIn the Kharkiv region of Ukraine, he was ordered to dig trenches in the area where new conscripts laid mines the day before. He doesn’t know if the landmine he stepped on was Ukrainian or Russian, but his left leg was amputated below the knee and he was taken from hospital to hospital for half a year before being fitted with an artificial limb.
Returning to work as a welder in Russia, he now endures 12-hour shifts that require him to stand, even though amputees are advised not to wear their prostheses for more than a few hours. Still, he is thankful to be alive and considers himself lucky.
Alexander’s prosthetist Yuri A. Pogorelov said that in the last year, about 100 limb prostheses were prepared on the basis of materials imported from Germany at the “Russian Sanitarium” resort, which combines treatment and rest, where the former soldier was treated. some local technology. Only a few of the prostheses were for war veterans in Ukraine.
A sanatorium built for the country’s political elite during the Soviet era offers a wide range of physical and psychological treatments. Demobilized veterans from all recent Russian wars and their relatives can come for two weeks a year for rest and treatment. About 10 percent of the fans are veterans of the Ukrainian war.
Late last year, Moscow estimated that Russians would need a record 70,000 prosthetic limbs each year, a dramatic increase. This figure includes civilian casualties and non-conflict-related amputations. But the Deputy Minister of Labor calculated this last year more than half of wounded veterans amputees.
Alexander emphasized that he was grateful for the free medical care he received, but that he did not suffer psychologically.
“Thank God I have managed my mental health in my own way,” he said. “I survived all these blasts and explosions and I’m fine.”
According to psychologists and experts, many veterans return with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Everybody here suffers from a little bit of post-traumatic stress disorder, whether they’re wounded, psychologically damaged, or families who have lost sisters, sons and fathers,” said Col. Andrey V. Demurenko, 69-year-old deputy commander. volunteer brigade for months The battle for Bakhmut. After suffering a fractured skull in May 2023, he returned to Moscow and found little psychological help for veterans.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have an orderly system built on at least an organized, understandable system of psychological recovery,” he said.
Currently, there are not enough trained professionals to treat veterans or conduct regular consultations for them, said Svetlana Artemeva, who said she is working on a project to train dozens of therapists to help soldiers struggling with post-traumatic stress in 16 regions of Russia. .
“You have to teach them how to live from scratch; they have to learn to sleep again because they don’t sleep at night,” said Artemeva, who works with the Special Operations Veterans Union, a nonprofit group. “They must not quiver at every rustle, they must not tremble, they must not be suspicious of everyone.”
Yelena Khamaganova, a psychologist at the “Rus” sanatorium, said that every soldier who fought in Ukraine undergoes a psychological examination upon arrival, and then participates in group and individual counseling. Many will be fighting for life, he said, recalling one recent patient, a veteran with a spinal cord injury who will have to urinate into a bag for the rest of his life. The man struggled to be close to his wife; Although they share a child, they were talking about divorce.
After leaving the facility, veterans can visit other centers, but they are not eligible to visit again for at least a year, meaning they will not see the same mental health professionals consistently.
“Rehabilitation cannot end with two, 10, or even 15 visits to a psychologist,” Ms. Artemeva said. “A person’s rehabilitation should last a lifetime, because the experience will reverberate throughout his life.”
Convincing only veterans to talk to therapists is a big part of the struggle. A machine gunner from Western Kursk Oblast, who gave his call sign as Tuba, said he had a bad experience with two therapists and didn’t want to talk more.
Tuba, 34, was sweating profusely and looked agitated during the interview. His mother and sister disapproved of his choice to volunteer for the army, and he was not romantically involved. According to him, he wanted to recover his arm, which was injured by a drone in Ukraine’s Zaporozhye region, and return to his comrades in the trenches. He said he didn’t like the contrast between his hard life as a soldier and the decadence of the big cities, where everyday life didn’t seem to be affected by the fighting.
“I didn’t meet a single Muscovite there,” he quipped, referring to the front lines. “They’re doing a concert – it’s rude and inappropriate.”
There are some civilians different viewreferring to cases where returning veterans – some of them are ex-prisoners released to fight in Ukraine – have committed serious crimes
Women on the train, a hub for soldiers passing through the long front line from the western city of Rostov, recently spoke of paying extra to sleep in women-only compartments, citing unpleasant experiences and inappropriate comments from drunken veterans who engaged in sexual acts.
In Sanitation, many soldiers who fought in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan or the wars in Chechnya said that Russian society is more accepting of veterans than in previous conflicts. In Afghanistan, the men were mobilized and mostly secretly returned in coffins.
President Vladimir V. Putin has visited rehabilitation centers and instructed his subordinates to create more facilities for wounded servicemen — a departure, experts say, from previous Russian wars.
Mr. Pogorelov, the prosthetist who made Alexander’s artificial leg, says: “The homecoming of a large number of Afghan soldiers came when the Soviet Union collapsed, and to put it mildly, the whole society did not have time for them.”
“The economy was in shambles,” he said. “What kind of rehabilitation or pension can there be in a country that expects food donations from George W. Bush like manna from heaven?”
But like some veterans, he said he was pleased that Russia’s economy felt more stable than it did in the 1980s and 90s, allowing civilians to shop “even though the country is at war.”
Alexander was in a sanatorium with his father, Vyacheslav, who was wounded in Afghanistan. Echoing the Kremlin’s narrative, Alexander made it clear he was not angry at Mr Putin for losing his leg as his father laid out what he claimed was Washington’s fault for the Ukraine war. Instead, both men expressed their gratitude to the leader who has been at the helm of Russia for 25 years.
“Thank God we have Putin,” said Vyacheslav oglu, nodding his head in agreement.
