Nazar was wounded on July 9 in Chassiv Iar, in the Donetsk region. Engaged in the infantry, he tells of the rocket fire, the building that collapses. Nazar is buried for 19 hours, his legs crushed by concrete blocks. At 33, this worker who became a soldier overnight is deprived of his two legs amputated above the knees.
>> War in Ukraine: a decisive Ukrainian counter-offensive?
The Russian army claims, Tuesday, September 13, to carry out massive strikes on all fronts. A response to the counter-offensive led by Ukraine for two weeks. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on Monday that the Ukrainian army had taken back 6,000 km² from the Russians thanks to the military “very motivated”. But this commitment is not without cost. kyiv has admitted to having already lost more than 9,000 soldiers. There are also many injured, like Nazar.
War in Ukraine: the testimony of Nazar, a Ukrainian soldier with both legs amputated, at the microphone of Benjamin Illy and Benjamin Thuau
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“We had no right to give in to an enemy who destroys our cities, rapes women, kills childrenexplains Nazar. You can’t give up. I did what I had to do. I have no regrets and thank God I’m alive.” He is undergoing rehabilitation in a center dedicated to the military. Here, there are a hundred of them, like him, mutilated, trying to regain their strength. They also helped by psychologists. Since the start of the war, the center has been full.
In the room where the patients train, Nazar does push-ups and sheathing exercises. He is surrounded by all his family, his wife and his four-year-old daughter. His wife Natalia, 29, first describes the shock when she found out her husband was injured. She cried for three days. She recognizes that “sometimes it’s difficult, it will be different”but she is very proud of her husband and “of his appetite for life“.
When she learned of her father’s condition, her daughter was “remained very calm”. “I told him that the main thing was that his father was still with us, that he had no legs, but that the doctors were going to give him new legs that our dad was going to be like a robot man and that we would have our own superhero”says Natalia.
Unlike most of the soldiers in the room who hope to return to the army in a function adapted to their handicap, Nazar has made his choice: he returns to civilian life while waiting for his prostheses, entirely financed by the authorities, as well as his medical care. Nazar looks serene, he’s not a diminished man. He is convinced: “Every problem, every pain makes us stronger”. When we ask him what we can wish him, he answers “a smile, a peaceful sky”.