As I was waiting outside Kyiv’s main military hospital at the end of April, I saw a man in a wheelchair come out of the main gate. He wove gingerly past seven “hedgehogs”—the large metal antitank traps that were deployed across the capital’s streets at the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Now they have almost all been cleared away. Soldiers were walking out of the gate carrying bags of medicine and large flat folders with their X-rays, while visitors were checking in.
Amid this morning rush the man wheeled himself to the end of the short, blocked road leading to the street. There he lit a cigarette and watched the world go by. He was wearing a T-shirt in the yellow and pale blue Ukrainian colors.
One of his legs had been amputated below the knee, and the other one was gone entirely. Both stumps were still bound with dressings. Maybe he suffered from phantom limb pain. In a few weeks perhaps he will be out of the wheelchair, learning to walk again on prosthetic legs.
The man was almost certainly one of the 380,000 Ukrainians who President Volodymyr Zelensky said in February had been wounded in this war. A few days earlier I had been in a bunker talking to a Ukrainian commander.
We were watching live drone feeds from the front line when he showed me a grainy one zooming in on a wounded Russian solider. “See, he has lost his leg,” he said. “So, are you going to finish him off?” I asked naively. “No, no!” he replied. A badly wounded soldier was worse for Russia than a dead one, he explained. First he would endanger the lives of any men who tried to rescue him,
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