A quiet yard, a high brick fence. Silent figures, no one speaks. A long silence, smoking and meditation, some voices from the street. My friend sits opposite me, trying to speak calmly and confidently, though it doesn’t turn out...
“Zmiy” Vlad Sord is a poet and veteran with the nom de guerre “Zmiy”. He is from Rudnytsia, Vinnytsia Oblast. At the age of 16, he ran away from home to Crimea and enrolled in the Yaroslav Mudry National Law...
On the verge of death In 2014, it was difficult to understand that a real war had erupted in Ukraine, says Dr. Yuriy Skrebets. At the time, Chief Physician Serhiy Ryzhenko gave several interviews about the first soldiers arriving at...
Prior to the war, Bohdan was a top student at Ivan Franko National University in Lviv where he studied Spanish philology, and probably never dreamt of wearing a military uniform. However, when war broke out in Eastern Ukraine, he left his...
“In the first two months of 2018, we’ve recorded two to three suicides per week, which means 16 soldiers have committed suicide since the beginning of this year. This information was recently issued by the Unified Register of...
Some twenty soldiers are sitting at a table, assiduously drawing and painting angels with the help of volunteers. Most of them have never worked on paper or canvas. The task is to draw an angel. Artur Spirin is one of the few veterans that...
His heart and soul are still over there, far away, with the war… But, the body has returned home. At first, the war inside fades slowly, retreating layer by layer, piece by piece … Slowly, very slowly, yesterday’s...
Much has been written about PTSD and the Donbas Syndrome, but not many people have seen it with their own eyes. By chance, I was witness to what havoc and misunderstanding PTSD can cause when I travelled in the same train compartment as a...
Hundreds of Ukrainian war veterans, servicemen, and police officers have taken part in a global social media campaign. The “22 PushUp Challenge” aims to shed light on the staggering number of veterans who commit suicide every...
-I arrived on December 23, 2014, and I’ve been here since that day. I go home every 2-3 months. My family is very patriotic, so they understand me. They know that if their mother is on the front lines, the enemy will never get...
First stereotype: Ukrainians are very poor Some Europeans viewed Ukraine as extremely poor. Many Ukrainian refugees were surprised to learn that. “They perceived us almost like we are cave people who do not know and have not seen...