Marcel Gascon
Kyiv, March 3. Thousands of civil servants and volunteers work daily in Ukraine to physically and emotionally rehabilitate soldiers injured, maimed or severely traumatized by the constant explosions and impact of shrapnel.
One of the pillars of this national mobilization is the Mental Health and Rehabilitation Center for Veterans Lisova Poliana, which belongs to the Ministry of Health, is located on the outskirts of Kiev and treats hundreds of soldiers with serious injuries or sequelae.
“The most common cases are the post-concussion syndrome which occurs following the explosions. We also treat amputations and traumatic lesions of the central or peripheral nervous system,” Dmytro Khrystych, one of the center’s physiotherapists, told Efe.
Dima, as everyone knows him, is a centerpiece of this framework made up of a hundred doctors, therapists, psychologists and professionals from other disciplines, as well as many other specialists who offer their services free of charge to help wounded soldiers.
SERIOUS SHAPPER INJURIES
Yurii Nechynskyi is one of Dima’s patients. Nechynskyi lived in New York with his family until Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when this former professional soldier decided to return home to enlist in the army, where he commanded a unit of 110 men.
He was seriously injured in December. “A projectile from a Huracán rocket launcher went through two walls of the building we were in and I was hit by shrapnel,” Yurii recalled during the exercise.
BACKED UP BY AN EXTERNAL BATTERY
“He broke my leg, completely sprained my arm and had shrapnel embedded in his head,” said the Ukrainian from Uman, a town 200 kilometers south of Kiev.
At the time of the explosion, Nechynskyi was carrying an external cell phone battery in his polar pocket. “The ‘power bank’ saved my life,” he says excitedly and amused as he explains how the device stopped a shrapnel that would have hit his vital organs.
FROM REFUGEE IN MURCIA TO VOLUNTEER IN kyiv
Kateryna Bovan studies Physical Education and comes to the center on a voluntary basis, where she gives recovery sessions for the abdominal and lumbar muscles, those of the pelvis and those surrounding the spine, as well as for “mobility of the shoulders and back” .
Kateryna arrived as a refugee in Spain with her sister in March 2022. They both spent three months in the town of San Pedro, Murcia, where the two young women learned enough Spanish to communicate before returning to Kyiv in June to contribute from here to the Ukrainian cause.
“THE ARMY OF BEAUTY”
In the Lisova Poliana center there is also an improvised hair salon. It was the initiative of Oleksii Antonyuk, a famous Ukrainian hairdresser who mobilized his colleagues to come and cut the hair of wounded soldiers.
“We have a Telegram group where we communicate emerging needs,” says Antonyuk, who called the group “the Army of Beauty.”
“When they ask us, we go,” says Antonyuk, whose experience helps him realize the high price his country pays for resisting Russian aggression.
Antonyuk is convinced that Ukraine will win this war, but calls on Western countries to send weapons “quickly” to accelerate the road to victory and stop the flow of wounded and maimed.
FELDENKRAIS METHOD AND ACUPUNCTURE
Some of these disabled soldiers attend the weekly class of writer, dancer and Feldenkrais Method teacher Larissa Babij. “It works with people with very different degrees of trauma,” Babij says of the practice, which aims to enhance individual body awareness through movement.
This practice, the professor explains, not only helps severely traumatized soldiers to relax. It also helps them get back to sleep, walk again, and speak fluently after disruptions caused by trauma.
FROM THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN TO THE RUSSIAN INVASIONS
The Lisova Poliana Center has treated Soviet veterans of the Afghan war for decades and renewed its mission in 2014, when Russian-led separatist militias declared independence for two regions in eastern Ukraine and that the war in the Donbass has broken out.
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine launched by Russia last February doubled the number of detainees, but those working at Lisova Poliana are keen to recall that Russian military aggression began in 2014 with the mutilation of Donbass and the annexation of Crimea.
Ukrainians, they point out, have been dying at the front for almost a decade. EFE
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