Wounded and war weary: Images of soldiers returning from the front in Eastern Ukraine
CBC
After nearly two and a half years of war, it is unclear how many Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or injured. However, the limited data released suggests it's well into the tens of thousands.
CBC News recently gained access to a medical evacuation bus transporting injured soldiers from the front line to a hospital in Dnipro Oblast in Eastern Ukraine.
The 25 patients evacuated on the volunteer-run bus included men who had been conscripted under the new mobilization law and were sent to the front with only very basic training, along with those who volunteered to fight early on in the war.
Here is what a few of them told us.
Most active Ukrainian soldiers will allow themselves to be identified only by their call sign. This 39-year-old IT specialist is known as "WIFI," and his time at the front line was brief. He was injured after two and a half days on the front. He had been stationed at a position near Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region, an area Ukrainian officials have described as experiencing some of the most challenging fighting along the front.
WIFI told CBC News that he was in a trench just a few hours earlier, helping to fortify it, when it came under attack. He said they came under fire from a Russian automatic grenade launcher.
After the first shot, he said, fragments flew into his thigh. "It felt like a syringe injection," he said.
The second shot hit him in his opposite foot.
"It was red-hot and immediately, there was a sharp pain and numbness of the foot."
He applied tourniquets to his limbs in an effort to reduce the bleeding. But once tightened, he found it impossible to even crawl out of the trench so he had to be carried out by two of his fellow soldiers.
When CBC News spoke with him, he was lying on a stretcher outside of an undisclosed pickup point, messaging his mother.
He said had been exempt from conscription because he has cancer, which is in remission, but when Ukraine passed the new mobilization law, it removed some medical exemptions, and he became eligible.
He said military officers turned up at his home in Poltava near the end of April. After receiving about two months of training, he was sent to the front and could be back there again after he heals.
It will be up to a medical commissioner to decide whether he is able to be called up again.
