Life After Injury
“Do you hear the birds outside, singing? It is beautiful”, I hear him saying.
His name is Evhenii, and he looks at me from the hospital bed he is lying on. He is thin, pale, and nothing like the beefy young guy on his social media profile picture. He is a Ukrainian army soldier, and two days after turning twenty-one he stepped on an anti-personnel land mine in East Ukraine. It severely injured his legs and caused damage to his internal organs. He wears a colostomy bag, and will be able to start walking only in three months.
My intent is to create ten to fifteen photo stories about young Ukrainian soldiers who were wounded during the ongoing war with Russia-backed rebels and Russian regular army in the Donbass region. Since May 2014 this conflict has taken over nine thousand lives. More than five thousand Ukrainian soldiers were injured. Just as the Afghanistan war veterans thirty years ago, they face a lack of physical and psychosocial rehabilitation programs.
I want to concentrate on their adaptation to peaceful life when they come home, a story that gets overlooked in media outlets and existing photography projects. With the limitations their physical trauma imposes on them, they have to face an important challenge. They have to resocialize, as now they are different people with painful memories impossible to forget. With no help from the government and less financial support from patrons they have to overcome new difficulties and seek possibilities themselves or with the support from their relatives and friends.
The Ukrainian government often neglects the contribution of these men. There are cases when war veterans’ documents would read that they were wounded during a military training. To get regular compensations they have to go through a special medical commission that would prove that they were injured during battle. No rehabilitation facilities that could potentially help Ukrainian soldiers deal with both physical and psychological trauma are built. Ukrainian war veterans have to reach out to special programs that would send them abroad for either physical or psychosocial rehabilitation.
With this project I would like to raise awareness on a growing number of war veterans in Ukraine. Despite the Minsk agreements that state a ceasefire, dozens of Ukrainian soldiers get injured every week. My goal is to create a website where their stories would be featured, which will also act as a fundraising platform for them. Each story would be presented as a series of visuals and a text interview conducted in person.