On a soccer field in Kiev, Yevguen stretches out his fingers and laughs: he’s missing an arm. Next to him, Oleg loses his balance while doing push-ups and groans: he’s missing a foot.
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The two Ukrainians are amputee soldiers who were injured at the front in the war against Russian forces.
With about ten other disabled people, civilians and soldiers, they take part in soccer training once or twice a week, a sport that most of them played before their injury.
Prosthetic legs are placed on the edge of the small artificial turf pitch in the center of the Ukrainian capital, which is illuminated by floodlights after dark.
Photo Roman PILIPEY / AFP
Oleg is 46 years old. He was an officer in the 46th Assault Brigade, a lead unit in Kiev’s ongoing counteroffensive at Robotyne.
Last December in Bakhmout, in a “melee, a (Russian) bastard shot at me with a grenade launcher from about seven meters away,” he told AFP, his face covered in sweat, his hands clenched on his crutches, also attached to his forearms .
” He was scared. “If he had held the gun, he would have hit me square in the chest and I wouldn’t be playing here now,” the bald man, who doesn’t want to give his last name, continues after warming up.
“I saw many men who lost their limbs, how they collapsed, couldn’t bear this terrible tragedy and started doing bad things like taking drugs,” he explains. “This is not easy to bear, believe me!”.
“I remember the first time: When the morphine stopped working, I lifted the warming blanket and looked, there was no leg (…) I felt like my life was over (…) But I am here ! » says this former police officer with a broad smile.
He was wounded twice before losing his foot and always returned to battle. He once even asked a doctor to provide a false certificate so that he could join “his people” at the front “so that I could never return to this hell.”
Photo Roman PILIPEY / AFP
“Live on”
But after the amputation, “I realized that I was afraid of losing my life, of becoming even more disabled. Because I have two children,” he explains.
During a five-on-five game, Yevgen Nazarenko is unstoppable in his goalkeeper’s cage. A ball of energy, his t-shirt is soaked in sweat and his left sleeve is empty and dangling.
The 31-year-old sergeant is a reconnaissance drone pilot. In May 2022, he directed mortar fire in the Kherson region. A defective grenade exploded in the tube, 10 m away from him. He lost an arm.
He has been an amateur football player since childhood and has only recently started playing again.
We have to “show the other injured people that life is not over and that you don’t have to stay at home,” he said out of breath during a break in play.
AFP
Ievguen has learned to fly a drone with one arm and wants to return to duty once he has his prosthesis.
The game continues, intensely: people scream, people applaud, people laugh.
Skillful, powerful and lively on his two crutches, Oleksandr Maltchevsky scored one goal after another with his good left foot.
It was amputated just below the right knee after being injured in a grenade attack near Kharkiv 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 have them take care of me,” he explains at the end of the game.
“Losing a leg has no effect on my psyche. Nobody forced me (to fight). I was ready from the first days, I knew there was a risk,” suspects the 31-year-old. “We live on and that’s all,” he concludes.
Oleksandre Maltchevsky Photo Roman PILIPEY / AFP
“We are adapting,” said Volodymyr Samous, 42, injured by shrapnel in Avdiivka, which the Russians have been trying to capture for months.
He was injured at 9 a.m. and 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 remembers.
He also played football for a long time. But when a leg is missing, “it’s a completely new feeling. Like a child learning to walk, we learn to play again.”