Vadym Svyrydenko lost his hands and feet during the disastrous battle for Debaltseve in February 2015.
He survived by a miracle, having waited for help for three days in freezing temperatures beside his comrades’ dead bodies.
An athletically built 43-year-old man, after suffering his injuries he found himself incapable of the simplest everyday tasks, like walking or eating.
Since that, he’s been learning to live anew – he can now walk, eat by himself and cook his own food. And he has set himself a new goal – to run in a 10-kilometer race.
Unlucky escape
Svyrydenko, a marketing specialist living in Kyiv, was called up in August of 2014 to serve as a paramedic.
In February 2015, he found himself in Debaltseve, a city in Donetsk Oblast some 800 kilometers away from Kyiv.
Joint Russian-separatist forces besieged the city to take control of one of Ukraine’s biggest railway junctions, forcing thousands of Ukrainian soldiers make a fighting retreat out of encirclement.
Around 500 Ukrainian soldiers were killed during the retreat along rough tracks through fields covered with ice and snow – and sowed with landmines.
During the siege, a convoy of several vehicles with injured soldiers tried to make its way out of Debaltseve to get wounded troops to hospital in the nearest big town. Svyrydenko was in one of them: His arm and thigh had shrapnel wounds.
But the injured never made it to the hospital. Landmines went off under the vehicles.
Some twelve wounded men, Svyrydenko one of them, were forced to spend the night in the wrecked truck, as temperatures plunged to a freezing minus 25 degrees Celsius.
Svyrydenko was the only one alive in the morning. All of his comrades had frozen to death in the night.
Vadym Svyrydenko speaks with Kyiv Post in his office in City Hall on Sept. 27. (Anastasia Vlasova)
The wait
The uninjured soldiers in their party had left for the next Ukrainian-held checkpoint right after the explosion, promising to send help.
But no help ever came.
There was no escape for Svyrydenko: Even if he could walk, he was in enemy-held territory and didn’t know his exact location.
So he waited. He waited for three long days and four longer nights, staying inside the truck wreckage, wrapped into blankets, surrounded by the corpses of his comrades. He ate snow.
“How I survived – this question goes to God,” he says with a smile.
On the morning of the fourth day, he was found by Russian-backed separatists, who took him to their stronghold, Donetsk.
They took the corpses too. The body of his 23-year-old commander, who died of cold in the truck, was buried in his hometown Lutsk in western Ukraine. One day, Svyrydenko wants to visit his grave.
Saved by the enemy
In Donetsk, Svyrydenko was sent to a hospital to get first aid. He says that the separatists had treated him better than most of other captives, giving him medical care and food. They did break two of his ribs when they heard he was from Kyiv. But he says it was nothing comparing to what the cold did to him.
Seeing his condition – his hands and feet were severely frostbitten – the separatists sent him off to the government-controlled territory.
In a Kyiv hospital, the doctors amputated his infected hands and feet.
When they asked his permission for the amputation, Svyrydenko felt angry and depressed. The alternative to amputation was death.
“It was hard to hear,” he recalls. “But the doctor told me I should live for my family.”
US rehabilitation
After the amputations, Svyrydenko had to learn everything from the ground up. Everyday tasks such as eating became impossible without help. He spent his days lying in bed.
A month after the surgery he ate by himself for the first time – Canadian physical therapists working in Kyiv brought him special devices designed to allow amputees to hold a fork or spoon.
“You have to learn as much as possible to become independent and not rely only on your wife or others’ help,” Svyrydenko says of his life after the amputations.
Svyrydenko spent six months in hospital in Kyiv. It was there that his rehabilitation started. Veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan came in to teach him how to walk on prostheses.
But Svyrydenko’s real recovery began when he traveled to the U.S. military medical center in Bethesda, Maryland, under a U.S. government-funded rehabilitation program. He spent eight months in the United States, where he took physical therapy courses, was given three pairs of hand and feet prostheses, and learned to run.
The next step was swimming. Svyrydenko was sure he would never swim again, but doctors persuaded him to try. He succeeded at once.
“A coach swam after me and yelled something, but I just asked him to leave me alone and let me swim,” he says.
Another challenge was cooking.
“The physicians wouldn’t let you go until you can show you can cook for yourself,” Svyrydenko says.
To prove that he had learned, Svyrydenko made steaks for the hospital staff. He didn’t even get a bite himself – everything was eaten immediately.
Sport and family
Many veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, which in extreme cases pushes them to suicide. Svyrydenko’s recipe to keep his spirits up is sports and family support.
“I would give all my medals to my wife,” Svyrydenko says.
When he was freezing in the field near Debaltseve, his wife was pregnant with their second child. Since his return, she has supported him at all times.
After he underwent the basic rehabilitation, Svyrydenko established his next goal. He applied to take part in a 10-kilometer race for veterans in the United States at the end of October, and was accepted.
To train for the race, every second day he goes to a nearby stadium and does up to 40 laps of the track, as his wife counts. He found inspiration in the Rio Paralympic Games.
The U.S. doctors gave Svyrydenko special running prostheses. To his knowledge, only three people in Ukraine who aren’t Paralympic athletes have such prostheses.
Post-war battles
After the rehabilitation, Svyrydenko didn’t go back to marketing. Instead, he works in a non-profit that aims to improve the lives of veterans.
Lobbying for an increase in budget funding for prostheses, improving access to buildings for people with disabilities, mentoring soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder – these are the issues that now occupy Svyrydenko’s day.
He has experienced such problems himself, of course.
Svyrydenko works on Khreshchatyk Street in the very center of Kyiv, but lives in the city’s outlying Troyeshchyna neighborhood some 15 kilometers away. He tried to use public transport, but there weren’t enough seats and standing wasn’t an option – with no hands he couldn’t hold the handrail. In the end, the government had to provide Svyrydenko with a driver to take him to work.
But this isn’t an option for everyone. So Svyrydenko works to raise awareness of disabled people’s problems and persuade the authorities that changes are urgent.
“If you’re behind the wheel, then do something, not just trifles,” Svyrydenko says.
