‘The tank fired and my leg just flew away like it wasn’t part of my body’
The toll from the war is clear at a rehabilitation centre in Lviv where there is talk of 50,000 amputees
Serhiy Pasechnik laughs as his energetic toddler son jumps into a wardrobe and peers cheekily through the crack in the door. Twoyear-old Yegor darts out and catches his father off guard with a tug so hard that he nearly topples over.
Mr Pasechnik’s biggest wish is to be able to chase after his son again. “He is too young to understand what has happened. Yesterday he bit me on the leg, causing me to cry out,” he said pointing to the rounded stump where his limb was amputated above the knee three months ago.
Mr Pasechnik, 26, and his family will pay a permanent cost for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine after his life changed in an instant.
After emergency battlefield surgery he is now among the many injured and maimed rebuilding their lives at the state-run Halychyna “centre of complex rehabilitation” on the outskirts of Lviv, a city of relative safety in western Ukraine. Andriy Sadovyy, the city’s mayor, wants to create one of the largest rehabilitation centres in the world for what he estimates could be up to 50,000 war amputees. On June 10, he will host an international donors conference hoping to raise the estimated £66 million needed to expand existing medical facilities to accommodate the surge. “We must do this, and we must do it fast,” he said.
Mr Pasechnik lost his leg while defending the village of Kamyanka in the Kharkiv region against a Russian tank assault on March 16. “Five colleagues scaled the fence in front of me but as I climbed over, I saw a tank facing me and then it shot in my direction,” he said. “I was lucky that the soil was quite soft and the shell exploded inside it, but with the shock wave and the shrapnel, my leg just flew away like it wasn’t part of my body.”
Mr Pasechnik received trauma care in a nearby garage for 40 minutes before being taken to a hospital in the town of Kramatorsk for an emergency operation where surgeons tried to save the remainder of his leg.
His story is tragically common among Ukraine’s war-weary population. The authorities are still scrambling to assess the scale of those civilians and soldiers to have lost limbs in Russia’s indiscriminate and brutal assault that has turned towns, villages and apartment blocks into battle zones. After just three months of war, medical experts and public officials fear tens of thousands may already be in desperate need of prosthetics and long-term rehabilitation.
Iryna Kosiandiak, 38, who runs a small rehabilitation clinic and prosthetics workshop in Lviv’s Sykhiv district, used to treat car crash victims or the elderly with amputations resulting from health conditions. Now she is receiving her first requests for help from victims of the war.
Traumatic limb injuries need at least three months to heal before the lengthy process of shaping and fitting the right prosthetic can begin, she said. “We are now expecting a huge wave of patients and we are sure that every facility producing prosthetics and rehabilitation centres will be busy very soon,” she said, adding that the country was struggling to meet the enormous challenge.
“The government is actively brainstorming to work out how to arrange all the logistics, how to raise funds and how to involve specialists to design specific prosthetics for a specific person,” she said. Lviv, an elegant city of Renaissance and Baroque buildings known for its Viennese-style cafés, has been spared the missile attacks and shelling that have devastated other cities further east, but it faces a heavy responsibility in absorbing traumatised citizens fleeing the Russian advance.
Five million displaced people passed through the city in the first 99 days of the war and some 200,000 stayed up to 10 weeks, cramming into any available public buildings, said Mr Sadovvy. He believes about 50,000 newly homeless citizens will now settle long-term in the city, requiring a million square metres of new accommodation and new sources of employment.
“We have received many internally displaced people and while many men are now fighting on the front lines, their children and wives are here in safety and that is very important,” he said.
Among them are Mr Pasechnik’s pregnant wife, Liza, who initially fled to Poland with Yegor to escape the bombardment of their home in the Donetsk region before returning to join her husband at his new rehab centre, a modern complex in the wooded countryside bordering the village of Velykyi Liuben.
“If we can, we allow soldiers to bring their families here ... this has a positive influence on the therapy process and they don’t have to worry about their family,” said Dr Volodymyr Hlovatskiy, the centre’s medical department chief.
Mr Pasechnik arrived at the centre last Friday, eager to speed up his recovery process. But a despondent flicker in his bright blue eyes as he left his first traction therapy session offered a glimpse of the long road ahead.
He said he feared the rushed surgery that left muscle on one side of his stump and bone on the other might not allow him the option of a sophisticated, high-quality prosthetic.
“I’ve been told I can only have a basic limb for the first year. I don’t want to wait that long,” he told Dr Hlovatskiy, with angst in his voice.
The doctor tried to reassure him it was a normal stage of a long process to help his body adjust to better prosthetics in future.
Serhii Titarenko, 37, an in-house psychologist who was paralysed from the waist down during his own military service on the eastern front in 2014, said patients were often initially affected by the unknown.
“We need to teach them social adaptation, how to learn to be their new self, how to learn to live again,” he said.
Mr Pasechnik said he hoped the state would support his full course of treatment and meet his family’s needs.
“I don’t know whether I will be able to return to my home town or whether it will be destroyed. It is intact now, but the city is being shelled so I don’t know if I will have a home after I leave this facility,” he said.
He aims to rejoin the police force where he worked before the war and has already received offers of admin jobs. For now, his focus is on recovering physically and psychologically from his trauma.
He said he is happy with the newly furnished family room in the rehabilitation centre and is comforted by the presence of his wife and child.
However, he adds: “What makes me uncomfortable being in Lviv, are the air raid alarms. When I hear them, I feel that there’s a rocket that, right now, is flying to hit me – like it will just tear off my second leg.”