On a soccer field in kyiv, Yevguen laughs as he stretches his fingers: he is missing an arm. Next door, Oleg loses his balance and groans to do push-ups: he is missing a foot.
The two Ukrainians are amputee soldiers after being injured on the war front against Russian forces.
With a dozen other invalids, civilians and soldiers, they participate once or twice a week in football training, a sport practiced by the majority of them before their injury.
Prosthetic legs are placed at the edge of the small artificial turf pitch, lit by floodlights after dark, in the center of the Ukrainian capital.
Oleg is 46 years old. He was an officer in the 46th assault brigade, a leading unit in the ongoing Kiev counter-offensive in Robotyne (south).
Last December in Bakhmout (east), in a fight “in hand-to-hand combat, a (Russian) bastard shot me with a grenade launcher from about seven meters”, he told AFP, his face beaded with sweat, his hands clenched on his crutches, also fixed to his forearms.
“He was scared. If he had held his weapon firmly, he would have hit me in the middle of the chest and I would not be playing here now”, continues after the warm-up the man with the bald head, who does not wish give his last name.
“I saw a lot of guys who lost their limbs, how they broke down, they couldn’t bear this terrible tragedy and started doing bad things, like taking drugs,” he explains. “It’s not easy to bear this, believe me!”.
“I remember the first time: when the morphine stopped working I lifted the thermal blanket and I looked and there was no leg (…) I had the impression that my life was over (…) But here I am!”, said this former police officer with a big smile.
Wounded twice before losing his foot, he always came back to fight. Once he even asked a doctor to produce a fake certificate to join “his guys” at the front, “so that I could never go back to this hell.”
But following the amputation, “I realized that I was afraid of losing my life, of being even more disabled. Because I have two children,” he explains.
In a five-on-five match, Yevguen Nazarenko is untenable in his goalkeeper’s cage. Ball of energy, his T-shirt is soaked with sweat, and his left sleeve is empty, dangling.
A 31-year-old sergeant, he’s a reconnaissance drone pilot. In May 2022, in the Kherson region (south), he was guiding mortar fire. A defective shell exploded in the tube, 10 m from him. He lost an arm.
An amateur football player from a very young age, he recently got back into it.
You have to “show the other guys who have been injured that life doesn’t end there and that you don’t have to stay at home,” he said, breathless, during a stoppage of play.
Ievguen learned to fly a drone with one arm and wants to return to service once he has his prosthesis.
The game resumes, intense: it shouts, it applauds, it laughs.
Skillful, powerful and lively on his two crutches, Oleksandre Maltchevsky slams goal on goal with his valid left foot.
He was amputated just below the right knee after being injured in a shell strike near Kharkiv (northeast) in May 2022.
“I have a wife, a 9-year-old son. I don’t want to be in a wheelchair in 10 years and they take care of me,” he explained at the end of the match.
“Losing a leg has no effect on my psyche. Nobody forced me (to fight). I was a volunteer from the first days, I knew there was a risk”, assumes the man of 31 years. “We continue to live and that’s it,” he concludes.
“We adapt”, abounds Volodymyr Samous, 42, injured by shrapnel in Avdiïvka (east), which the Russians have been trying to take for months.
Wounded at 9 a.m., he arrived at the hospital at 4 p.m. “I was under fire for a long time, there was no way to save my leg,” he recalls.
He also practiced football for a long time. But with one leg missing, “it’s a completely new feeling. Like a child learning to walk, we learn to play again.”
06/09/2023 08:48:01 – Kiev (Ukraine) (AFP) © 2023 AFP
