‘I had my chance to die – but I made my choice’: meet the young Ukrainian soldier fighting for amputee visibility
We have all met a young man like Daniil Melnyk, this open-faced, sunny 21-yearold with a disarming grin. As soon as he walks into the studio, in a former factory in Lviv in western Ukraine, the chat and jokes begin. Melnyk is used to being here. He has been photographed several times by the artist Marta Syrko. But he’s less used to having an audience in the room. As soon as everyone has introduced themselves, he and Syrko get to work. First, he pulls off his sweatshirt and trousers, revealing the heavily tattooed body of a young soldier. Then he removes his prosthetic legs: he has had two below-the-knee amputations. He lacks three of the fingers of his right hand.
Syrko has asked him to position himself on a sheet of reflective metal. She surveys him from different angles, suggesting adjustments to his pose. At one point, she photographs him through a mirror – the resulting images will have a mysterious, slightly subaqueous feel. Julia Kochetova, the Observer photographer, darts around, capturing the whole process. Throughout, the conversation flows. Melnyk teases Syrko: “You’re like my teacher at school. But I can’t sit still!”
Syrko’s artistic focus has long been on the human body – “athletes’ bodies, older people’s bodies, thinking about the way the body holds experience”. She has worked with subjects with Down’s syndrome, and with her elderly grandparents, whom she has photographed nude: she makes portraits with a physical frankness that is unusual in socially conservative, religious western Ukraine. In November last year, she was in France for the annual Paris Photo art fair when she visited the Louvre and, as she wandered among the mutilated ancient Greek and Roman sculptures, a fresh project began to take shape in her mind. “The hardest thing,” she says, “was to find the first hero willing to be photographed – and then the next hardest thing was to explain that they were going to have to be naked, with their scars, with everything that had happened to them.”
Official figures put the number of Ukrainians who have undergone amputations at 20,000 since the start of the full-scale invasion, though experts on the ground suspect the real figure is much higher, perhaps as many as 50,000. The numbers are edging towards those of the first world war (historians estimate that 67,000 Germans and 41,000 Britons had amputations between 1914 and 1918). The scale of what is happening is obvious on the streets of Ukraine’s cities. And yet, Syrko noticed that this reality was not being reflected in the Ukrainian media.
Syrko has now worked with several different people who have been seriously injured in the war, finding subjects by word of mouth or through Instagram or TikTok. Her first shoot, with a military volunteer who had lost both his legs, was not straightforward: it was in December last year, when Russia was targeting Ukrainian energy infrastructure and there were frequent blackouts. “It was cold and dark in the studio – we could only work for about 15 minutes,” she says. “And then afterwards we went for dinner and I realised how many difficulties disabled people have because of our lack of infrastructure. It was like a click in my head. I realised that I wanted to scream a bit about this issue. Now, almost two years from the start of the invasion, it is clear that we will soon have a totally different society. We have to get used to it. We have to understand how to act.”
And so, amid the battle to defend their country, Ukrainians face a second struggle: to adapt their society to this new reality. “Even if the war were to stop tomorrow, the number of amputations would keep climbing,” says Olga
Rudnieva, chief executive of the charity Superhumans, which runs a rehabilitation centre in Lviv. “40% of Ukraine’s territory is now mined. It will take us decades to clear it, and people will be returning to their houses and they will be stepping on mines for years. And we haven’t even started the demining of forests and lakes. All this means that we have to be ready to work with people who have lost their limbs for years to come.”
Even today, there remains in Ukraine traces of a culture of stigma and denial that has deep roots in Soviet history. After the second world war, those with disabilities provided an uncomfortable reminder of the cost of the USSR’s victory. Disabled veterans were, in their thousands, deported to labour camps in Kazakhstan and the Valaam archipelago in Karelia. In the decades that followed, amputations following industrial accidents were commonplace but unacknowledged by the state. In 1980, Moscow hosted the Olympic, but not the Paralympic, games, after an official declared, “There are no disabled people in the Soviet Union.”
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Melnyk heard about Syrko’s work through word of mouth and they began following each other on social media before she invited him to sit for her. His absolute determination to be open about what had happened to his body meant he had no qualms, only curiosity, about being photographed: their ease with each other in the studio is obvious.
Over coffee after the shoot, Melnyk talks about how he came to be injured – a story that pours straight out of him without a trace of self-pity or self-dramatisation. On 24 February 2022, the day the Russians began their full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he was two days away from graduating from military academy in Lviv. “It was very clear something was happening. The Russians were massing troops at the border,” he remembers. He was looking forward to an army career. He felt ready. He already knew what unit he wanted to serve in – and, as the tanks rolled into Ukraine, he went straight to join it, mailing his belongings to his family.
Within a week or so he was in Malyn, a town some 100km northwest of Kyiv, instructing mobilised civilians who had volunteered to help defend their country at this moment of extraordinary peril. “Some didn’t even know how to shoot – I taught them at least how a machine gun sounds, and not to drop it,” he said. Then he was chosen to be part of a squad that moved nearer to Kyiv, stationed in a former sanatorium. The Russians had been ad