The face of Ukraine: I lost my eye, but I am one of the lucky ones

I barely recognised Nikita Rozhenko as he paced across Kharkiv’s central square one afternoon last month.

A black patch covered what was once a piercing blue eye, pronounced scars bisecting the visible part of his face, and he had grown muscular.

“I’m going back,” he said with a laugh. “With one eye and seven titanium plates in my skull, but I’m going back. I’ll just have to shoot with my left hand instead of my right.”

His war wound hadn’t done anything to his sense of humour at least.

I first met Nikita, 30, in May, when his brigade was part of an outnumbered Ukrainian force holding back a Russian artillery offensive south and west of Izyum.

A young member of Kharkiv city council, he had joined the army on the second day of the invasion.

Back then, underneath the camouflage and the assault rifle, he was just a bright-eyed politician.  

He is now one of tens of thousands of Ukrainians grappling with life-changing injuries.  

Ukraine’s casualty figures are a closely guarded military secret but US officials estimated this week that 100,000 have been injured or killed.

It is clear that losses are high, and that they will have a profound impact not only on individual lives, but the fate of the nation, for years after this war is over.

And the cold numbers hide countless personal tragedies.

Those who survive have seen their lives altered in ways that most of us would dread to even imagine. Confined to wheelchairs, unable to feed themselves or even speak, they will require care for the rest of their lives.

Nikita is still getting used to focusing with one eye, and finds it difficult to pick things up.

But he is immensely fortunate.

“I am lucky several times over. Firstly, I’m lucky I’m still alive. Then I’m lucky that I’m not paralysed by the fractures in my neck. Thirdly, I’m lucky that I can still function. The brain damage in the end was not severe,” he said.  

“I have a friend, Andrei. We joined up together on February 25. He received similar trauma as me about a month later. Shell hit the dugout. He’s also got metal in his skull.

“He can’t speak. He understands everything but can’t say anything. They say if he tries hard then slowly, somehow, in two or three years, he may talk again.”

Nikita says about half the people he joined up with on Feb 25 last year have been killed or wounded.

They all knew what they were getting into, he adds, and were prepared and even expecting to die in what they thought would be a doomed defence of their country.

I first met Viktor Pysanko, a military doctor, one week into the invasion, when he was running a military hospital in Zaporizhzhia.

I revisited him a few weeks ago treating soldiers from the raging battle of Bakhmut, and - just like at the beginning of the war - most of them have been injured by shrapnel and blasts from explosions.

What has changed is the nature of the patients.

Early in the war, most soldiers were in their 20s and professionals. Now men in their 30s and 40s are coming through, and they are overwhelmingly citizen soldiers.

“We are medics. Furthermore, we are soldiers. We are used to death,” he said.

“But these are ordinary guys who were programmers or window cleaners or what have you a few months ago. A few hours before they get here they have very nearly died, and also seen their friends blown to pieces next to them. That is not an easy thing to deal with.

“In two or three weeks they will have to go back and fight. And they know they might be the next ones to die.”

He says he is trying to turn the hospital into a space for the soldiers to recover mentally as well as physically. That means visits from relatives and school children, concerts, and other morale-raising events.  

“When this war is over, there will be another war,” Viktor, in his mid-30s, said, referring to the coming battle with long-term physical and psychological traumas.

When I met Viktor in the first weeks of the war he was quietly, coldly furious. The Russians had opened fire on his paramedics and sent sabotage teams to park cars across the hospital entrance.

The only way to end the nightmare, he concluded, was to kill “these f------ animals” who had invaded his country.

His anger has not subsided. If anything, it seems to have hardened, along with his intense, idiosyncratic charisma that has attracted a loyal team of fellow civilian and military surgeons, but often annoys his superiors.

Last year he was kicked out of Zaporizhzhia, he said, for irritating the powers that be with his willingness to speak up about shortages of equipment and other problems in medical provision.

He took the government to court for unfair dismissal and won, and is now running a smaller facility somewhere in the Kharkiv region.

The facility is basic, and short of essentials. One surgeon asked us to mention that they lack modern equipment such as C-Arm x-ray machines to allow them to scan casualties for shrapnel and bullet fragments more quickly, in the hope one might be donated.

Viktor asked me to keep the location secret and, observing the omerta on casualties, refused to discuss the numbers and severity of cases he deals with. “It depends on the front. If it is busy there, it is busy here,” he said.

He admits his methods do not always go down well with the army and its obsession with controlling visitors.

“The whole thing we are trying to do here is to create a space where they can feel normal. Where they can feel at home, and recover. Where they can be treated like heroes and know what they are fighting for,” he said.  

That is for the lightly wounded. Not men like Alexander, an infantry sergeant who was blown sideways by a Russian tank shell near Bakhmut.

Two of his men died, and only his helmet stopped the shard that would have killed him. But he told The Telegraph he expected to be back in combat in weeks.

For those more grievously hurt, Viktor says, Ukraine needs help from its allies. Thousands of people crippled for life are in need of modern long-term rehabilitative care that is simply not available in sufficient capacity in the country.

If Ukraine’s allies can send tanks, surely they could take more of those people, he argues.

Nikita tells me he does not know exactly how he was wounded. But he remembers the night on Sept 13.  

His battalion, part of an infantry brigade drawn mostly from the Kharkiv region, had been ordered forward to take part in the counter-offensive to retake Izyum.

Driving ahead of the main column in his own vehicle, he became separated in the dark from the staff officer he worked with.

He has tried to reconstruct what happened next. He may have hit a mine, or been ambushed, or swerved and lost control of the vehicle. His own memory goes blank for the following week.

His comrades say they found him by the side of the road, having somehow pulled himself out of his overturned and wrecked vehicle. The entire right-hand side of his body was a bloodied, bruised mess.  

In hospital, the doctors told him he had potentially serious brain damage and that the coming days would decide whether he lived or died - or so he has been told. He does not recall the conversation.

In the end, he pulled through. Although for the first three months afterwards life was like “being a prisoner in my own body. I wanted to do things and couldn’t”.The mental impact of wounds is something that also preoccupies military medics.

He thinks back to the hospital ward with a shudder. “Say a man wakes up and he has no arms. He immediately has problems. He starts to scream every night. People find it most difficult to deal with psychologically.”

He says: “The scary thing was coming back a total invalid. Someone who cannot move at all.

But he warns that even those without physical wounds will return with mental scars.

“I can speak about myself. My restraint system works ok - I can calm myself down. But sometimes I have explosions of aggression that I never had before.

“Someone says something off, and for a moment I find myself threatening to break their knees. And then I calm down and think ‘what is going on?’”

“The life I had before is not coming back. Military life - I miss it. I felt needed there. This… it’s just a pause. Life is on pause.”

He takes a breath as he reflects on the man he was before Feb 24 last year.

“That Nikita was more emotional, perhaps. More naive, more full of life, funnier. More lighthearted. I became colder in some way. In a positive sense.

“Those problems that used to worry me - something someone said, something that didn’t work out, not having enough money - these problems are no longer problems. There’s a reassessment of values. I’m alive and warm and I don’t need anything else. The cat is on my lap and I can turn on the TV. That’s all I need to be happy.”