Oleksandr Ivanko, 33, wants to dance with his wife again. It is his first wish. She looks at him from a distance, enough to not have heard him. But he also dreams of getting in the car and driving. And playing with his two daughters, ages 8 and 15. Ivanko is a military man by profession. He is elusive in his story, suspicious and cautious. He does not want to give data that would compromise his people against the enemy. He lived in many places during his life, but he stays with Poltava, a city in central Ukraine. Ivanko lost his right leg on April 15. He was repairing a helicopter engine at a military position in the east of the country when a Kh-59 missile, one of the Russian demons, fell about 20 meters away and ripped off his limb. “I have had many nightmares, but I have accepted the situation, I have good morals,” he says from a wheelchair in the Superhuman Center in the small municipality of Vinniki, on the outskirts of Lviv, in western Ukraine. Ivanko is one of 70 patients at this state-of-the-art facility dedicated to prosthetic manufacturing, therapy, and military and civilian reconstructive surgery. The waiting list exceeds two thousand.
In times of war, precise data is scarce, as are half-truths. The most modest figure of amputees as a result of the Russian invasion is around 20,000, according to local organisations such as Pryncyp, dedicated to the defence of the rights of the military. The highest figure is around 50,000. The challenge is enormous with these victims: firstly because of the severity of their injuries; secondly because of access to prostheses, which is limited and very expensive – they can range from 3,000 euros to more than 100,000 euros, depending on the material and technology – and finally, because of the harshness of the therapy and their psychosocial rehabilitation. In the case of soldiers, their possible return to the front is also complicated, although not impossible.
Losing a limb is not the same as being immobilized, nor is suffering such an injury and losing your sense of humor. Private Ivanko, who before Ukraine served in eastern Congo, is a good example of this. Asked about what he felt when the projectile destroyed his leg, he hesitantly said: “I immediately realized that instead of a car with gears I would have to have an automatic one.” More seriously, he talks about his morning, when he walks again. He wants to return to the front. “My brigade commander tells me every day that he is waiting for me,” he says very confidently.
The Superhumans Centre, a name chosen to boost the morale of patients and to attract foreign donors, was founded in April 2023 by the Ukrainian businessman Andrey Stavnitser, 42, co-founder of the port operator TIS, and with the support (15 million euros) of the American Howard G. Buffett Foundation. The initiative aimed to make an almost impossible task more possible: caring for such a large number of disabled citizens in such a short time. The Ukrainian state offers prosthetic assistance to its military. The government has just approved a resolution to speed up access to highly functional prostheses, with costs ranging from 25,000 to 55,000 euros. But all this is not enough.
To be one of those Superhuman At the Vinniki facilities you have to fill out an application online and wait for a call. Every Friday, around a dozen patients finish the therapy and pass the baton to another dozen who begin it. Immersed in the entry process, which can last weeks, there are more than 700 candidates. It is estimated that there are another 2,500 people who have requested to enter the center.
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That’s what Pavlo Romanovskii, 34, from the city of Dnipro, in the eastern part of the country, did. He exercises, sitting on the padded bench of a weight machine, the stump of his left leg, amputated above the knee, moving it from bottom to top. She closes her eyes and twists her expression. He is suffering. He talks, without losing his smile, about the damn Murphy’s law, which caused that on July 22, 2023, the only projectile that fell in his position, next to Andriivka, on the eastern front, hit a foot away . Not a single detail is skipped. He grabs the notepad and draws the shuttle and the ammunition that sliced off his limb. He has a video of how he looked, with his leg and head bandaged. Romanovskii is a good example of what an injured person is: scars all over his chest, damage to his hearing system and 27 interventions.
“I don’t feel disabled,” adds this soldier with a long beard. He soon realized that he had to be in shape, that he had to work hard in the gym to do what he had always liked, whether it was climbing, riding a motorcycle or doing kitesurf. But for all that, there is still. His wife and his five-year-old daughter are the driving force of the present, but he admits that he still does not have “his previous life.” He needs more time to control the prosthesis. He adjusts it casually and grabs a small weight with his left arm to walk around the room. It’s hard. And despite everything, he also wants to return to the front. “I will do it for my daughter and for all the children of Ukraine.” His brigade, according to what he says, does accept uniformed personnel with amputations.
The theory, according to the mobilization law approved in April, says that men with bilateral amputation at any level or unilateral amputation of the lower limb above the upper third of the leg, are exempt. Another thing is the practice: firstly because the Ukrainian forces, outnumbered by the Russian uniformed men, need to multiply their troops and the most veteran know this. Secondly, because there are many rearguard positions that can be filled despite having some prosthesis.
Oleksandr Kutsan, 36, from historic Pereyaslav, would be in the first group of this section of the new law. On March 19, 2023, in a position near Liman in the east, a shell shattered both of his legs. He still remembers, with a certain irony, how he himself, lying on the ground, had to teach a 19-year-old novice how to put on tourniquets. At least, the amputation of the left leg was done below the knee. It has taken him four months to master the prostheses. “It is difficult to keep balance with both,” he admits. Kutsan, who now chats from a wheelchair, is not one of those who wants to go back to battle. He collaborates with the Superhumans Center, showing visitors, among other things, the challenges of his new mobility. Life has changed radically for him, but there is someone who continues to make him laugh, consciously defeated by his pranks. “It is my motivation,” he says. His daughter.

Perhaps Kutsan is an exception among those who, despite pain and disability, willingly accept this new mission of Superhuman and they return to the ranks. Alban Torres, 43 years old, born in the Cauca Valley, in Colombia, does not conceive of anything other than returning with his battalion, the 204th. He is part of this international contingent that has been feeding the Ukrainian forces. “Money is not everything,” he explains, with extreme politeness, before recounting how he was wounded in the Donetsk sector by a drone that he calls a “kamikaze”; how he lost part of his right leg, suffered a bullet in the shoulder and had his ears crushed – he is trying out a new hearing aid, but still hears a lot of “noises” – and how he asked his companions to shoot him in the head so that he could die right there. “I realized that I was going to be a burden,” he says after finishing his exercises. He was transferred to a hospital in Konstiantinivka. Torres, a soldier with 20 years of service, has family in Colombia and his wife in Spain. He has been trying to leave the wheelchair for two weeks.
-What is the hardest?
―It takes one’s will to want to get up again.
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