Europe | The enemy within

Thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are suffering with PTSD

Treatment has progressed, but not nearly enough

A Ukrainian serviceman pauses after coming back from the frontline near Kherson, southern Ukraine, Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2022. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)
The wages of warImage: AP
|KHARKIV PROVINCE

IN THE GLOOM of a grey and freezing late-January morning it is a forbidding place. Its location is also secret, beyond the fact that it is somewhere in Kharkiv province in Ukraine’s north-east. Soldiers arriving or departing from what is the country’s only military rehabilitation centre dedicated to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) do so in civvies, so as not to draw attention. Every week around 100 soldiers arrive for treatment, suffering the gamut of battlefield trauma symptoms: from sleeplessness and nightmares to flashbacks and crushing feelings of guilt at having survived when so many of their comrades fell.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “The enemy within”

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