Vladimir Putin has an obvious advantage in manpower three years into the war in Ukraine, but even Ukrainian soldiers who have lost a leg push to return to the front lines as soon as they recover.
Ukraine’s unbroken defenders say they would crawl into battle to defend their country if they have to. “You can lose a limb, but you can’t lose your dignity,” said Hulk, the call sign of the chief sergeant of the 1st Battalion of the Achilles 429th Separate Unmanned Systems Regiment. (Like most Ukrainian soldiers, Hulk prefers to be identified by his call sign.)
Ukraine has managed to sustain an armed force of about 1 million, and even those who are suffering from pain and mental trauma, who might seem like the most obvious people to give up, carry on.
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Before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, 48-year-old Hulk ran a business in Kyiv. During a combat mission in October 2022, he stepped on a landmine and lost part of his right leg. Doctors told him his rehabilitation would take a year, but he returned to the front lines in just a month and a half, after receiving his prosthetic.
The secret to his resilience is simple, Hulk said: “We cannot imagine our children living under occupation. My motivation is to prevent that.”
Of course the psychological trauma is immense. Dr. Oleh Berezyuk, one of Ukraine’s leading psychiatrists, is helping Ukrainians to heal from the war at a rehabilitation center in Lviv for veterans called Unbroken.
One of the most effective therapies, Berezyuk told The Daily Beast, is art. One of the drawings he showed The Daily Beast depicted the hell of war. It showed a throne with, bizarrely, a red star sitting on it.
“The patient was convinced he had a mission to make order out of a messy hell, and if he couldn’t do that, he would kill everybody, including me and his other doctors,” said Berezyuk, a specialist on psychological trauma from war. “Even now I have goosebumps when I remember the first sessions” with the patient, a 23-year-old named Volodymyr, he added.
Berezyuk uses many progressive methods of psychological rehabilitation. One of them is weaving therapy. Wounded soldiers and civilians push on four pedals of a loom, pull colorful threads, and count rows to create patterns. “The method shows impressive results with patients with concussions, brain injury, and depression, helping them to heal, to stay unbroken,” said Berezyuk, who is also an advocate of micro doses of antidepressants, even in extremely complicated cases.
The horrors of war have been causing mental trauma to millions of Ukrainians for three years. Tens of thousands of people have been killed or wounded, including more than 1,000 children. People lost loved ones, homes, whole cities—the wounds both physical and mental multiply every day. And yet the country continues to fight.
This winter, Ukrainian cities are struggling with electricity and heating, but municipal workers quickly fix the infrastructure destroyed by Russian drones and missiles. Volunteers clean up the ruins and life goes on.
Ever since the early days of the war, the Unbroken center has been packed with patients. The doctors were overwhelmed with the number of mental health cases. These were former soldiers who arrived after prisoner swaps who had spent many months in Russian prisons, and wounded soldiers fresh from months or years of trench fighting.
“We have no other option but to survive, stay unbroken and mobilize our resources,” Berezyuk said. “This is not the first time we suffer from Russian invasion and occupation, but this time technology helps us against disinformation and manipulation. They miscalculated in Moscow. We’ve learned our lessons, and this time we were the most prepared.”
The 23-year-old patient Voldoymyr, who drew the picture of hell, in fact recovered relatively quickly, Berezyuk said. If he had “ended up in an ordinary psychiatric clinic, he would have been diagnosed with schizophrenia and put on heavy medication,” Berezyuk said. “We asked our patient to paint his horrors.”
The doctors diagnosed Volodymyr with psychosis but tried psychotherapy instead of ant-psychotic drugs: “The patient took me to his hell, we were there together.” Signs of recovery came in three weeks. The last drawing the patient sketched depicted a house, a road, and a family. “We saw hope,” Berezyuk said.
Wartime in Ukraine is extremely depressing. Unthinkable violence becomes a reality. People live with daily air alerts, reading news of explosions, war crimes, ruined hospitals, and schools and casualties of the Russian military forces advancing in the eastern regions of the country. Even short trips to Ukraine leave many Western visitors traumatized.
“What keeps us unbroken is the notion that we are on the right side of history, that our people are heroes, that we are a united civil society supported by dozens of Western countries,” a young patient, Katia, told The Daily Beast earlier this month. She could not talk long, as she was suffering from severe PTSD after losing her mother in the eastern Donetsk region.
An August report by the Red Cross said that more than 70 percent of Ukrainians experienced stress or severe anxiety, “around 15 million Ukrainians will need psychological support in the future, with about 3-4 million requiring medication.” Psychology is one of the most popular professional fields among Ukrainian students today. People research, study, and help each other to survive.
“We teach resilience—this is a necessary part of human life today, when we live and work in conditions of high risk and political turbulence,” the head of the nonprofit Daily Humanity’s 2402 Foundation, Katerina Sergatskova, told The Daily Beast. “We train, unite people, exchange experience, and strategize.”
Berezyuk studied in Chicago, and as soon as the war began, he got in touch and began to brainstorm with colleagues at Yale, Harvard, and Brown universities, along with specialists in France and Germany. It was a new moment in psychotherapy and joint research into the best way to heal from the war.
“Our American colleagues told me not to make the mistake the United States made after Vietnam, when they lost more soldiers after the war than on battlefields, to alcohol and suicide,” Berezyuk said.
Before sessions, he said he often dreads the moment when the door opens and one more patient walks in, or rolls in on a wheelchair, bringing hell with them.
“They all have seen that hell,” he said. “The eyes of death looking at them from the dark. These patients nail you to the wall with their penetrating eyes. They search for how sincere you are with them, if you really care,” Berezyuk said. “Sometimes it takes one session to develop the trust to reveal that core thing to them—that I really do care and will help them stay resilient.”
Commander Yuriy Fedorenko founded the Achilles Regiment with strict rules: respect the law, never drink alcohol, always stay shoulder to shoulder with your comrades. “I was wounded too, but despite the fact that there were health restrictions, I joined the army from the first day of the full-scale invasion,” Fedorenko told The Daily Beast. “There is no other way to protect your family, city, and state, except with weapons in your hands.”
