Izyum has been the site of unimaginable horror during the ongoing war in Ukraine. After a long battle, in April 2022, Russian forces seized control of the Ukrainian city, which remained under occupation for the next six months. The more fortunate fled before their city fell, but those who remained, often the elderly, sick, or low-income, were forced to live under Russia’s military rule.
When Ukraine’s military finally liberated Izyum, last October, during its fall 2022 counteroffensive, they discovered a mass grave filled with 447 bodies and multiple torture chambers. Even after 10 months free from Russian control, residents of Izyum and its surrounding towns and villages still feel the effects. Amongst destroyed storefronts and residential homes are people who lost arms and legs to Russian landmines planted in the frontline town. The injuries were instant, but civilians were left unsure of what to do next, with no idea how to progress with their lives after such catastrophic events.
In June 2022, Valerii Borsch, 76, was walking along the streets of his village, Kamianka, near Izyum, which at the time was also under Russian control. Speaking with me recently near his apartment, Borsch says, “I went outside, left the yard, and there were Shilka tanks driving from Belgorod,” a Russian city not far from the border with Ukraine. Borsch tells me these Russian tanks were based on his street; he had tried to move out of the way, to let the vehicles pass him by. Stepping back, he set off a landmine, and the explosion sliced his left leg off completely. “I crawled around 450 meters to the tree and started screaming. My granddaughter, she was 13 years old then, she ran to me. I told her I will crawl to the yard, and I told her to run to the Russian military.”
“A paramedic and a senior lieutenant ran to me. They gave me a painkiller shot, took me on a truck, and drove me to the hospital. Here in Izyum, there was no light on the first floor in the hospital. There were Russian doctors,” Borsch recalls. After his initial treatment at the hospital, Borsch had hoped he could return to his home. But, he says, Russian soldiers transported him to Belgorod for further medical help.
Lydia Oleksandrivna says she was walking in the forest alone when she stepped on the mine. “There are a lot of different explosion devices in the forest. I didn’t have any thoughts. I wanted only to crawl to the phone and call an ambulance.”
This most recent round of landmine casualties is not a challenge faced only by residents in the Izyum region. It is part of a broader issue in Ukraine. The country grappled with landmine contamination after World War I, World War II, and Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine was listed by ReliefWeb as one of the world’s most landmine-contaminated countries, in 2021, and ranked fourth in global mine casualties, after Afghanistan, Yemen, and Mali.
Even countries that have long since ended conflicts, such as Cambodia, where wars raged on from the mid-1960s to 1998, are still plagued with unexploded devices. According to the United Nations Development Program, mines in Cambodia have been the cause of 65,000 human casualties and 20,000 deaths since 1970. The process of locating and demining land takes immense time and attention to the task. Still, even the slightest effort can save some residents from Borsch’s fate.
In Belgorod, Borsch had no documents with him, nothing to prove that he was Ukrainian and to help him return home. Russian good samaritans tried to assist him in adjusting to his life in Belgorod. These civilians helped him find an apartment, paying for it with their own money, because Borsch had almost none. He lived at the apartment for one month, until his sister in Ukraine managed to find a volunteer, a Ukrainian woman born in Izyum who had lived in Russia since before the war began, to help Borsch escape. One day, the volunteer arrived at Borsch’s apartment and told him there was a bus from Belgorod to Izyum in a few hours, saying, “All you need is 6,000 Russian rubles” [roughly $63].
“I had only 1,000. She left and returned later with 7,000. She collected this money from Russians,” says Borsch, referring to the residents of Belgorod who helped pay for his bus back to Ukraine.
That night, Borsch was on a bus headed home. He met his family there, who now help him adjust to life without his leg. “I called my daughter, and she took me here to my younger daughter. I am waiting for a prosthesis now. They told me that they put me on the waiting line for a prosthesis,” he explains. Borsch is not sure when he will receive a prosthetic leg, because he cannot afford to buy one himself and does not know when Ukraine’s government can give him one. His experience is just one of many in a region where landmines are a constant threat. Speaking of his time in Russia and the help that Russian civilians gave him as he tried to return home, Borsch says, “I think there are a lot of good people in this world.” Then he adds, “Around 11 people I know were blown up by the mines in Kamianka. And with me, I got only my leg ripped off.”
One survivor of exploded devices in Kamianka is 34-year-old Oleksander, who lost his leg in a mine explosion on January 18, 2023, when he was in his front yard with relatives. Although he had lived at his home for months following Kamianka’s liberation, he was unaware a landmine had been buried on his land. One wrong step cost him his right leg.
“At that moment, for around 15 minutes, I didn’t feel anything, and then I started feeling the blood circulating over my body, and that’s it. They [relatives] put a bandage on my leg and put me in the car. I was in shock,” recalls Oleksander, speaking to me at his grandmother’s house, where he now lives. He cannot afford to live alone because he is out of work.
Shortly after the incident happened, Red Cross volunteers came to Oleksander to measure for a prosthetic leg for him, but there has been no update on his case for six months. “The Red Cross once gave me financial help, and Kyiv promised to give some financial help, but they didn’t. For two months, we’ve got nothing,” he concludes.
Demining efforts are being carried out by the State Emergency Service of Ukraine and nongovernmental organizations such as HALO Trust, which helps countries clear landmines after conflicts. The Ukrainian government has set a goal to clear 80% of potentially contaminated lands and return them to normal use over the next 10 years. The World Bank estimates that the full demining package will cost Ukraine more than $37 billion, an expense, the United Nations noted in its June 2023 report, the country cannot afford alone.
International support has poured in to help Ukraine rid itself of landmines, with the Biden administration providing over $89 million to help clear its land, in August 2022, and the European Union sending over €25 million in February 2023 to demine the country’s liberated areas. Although these countries are working to help alleviate the pressures of funding demining efforts during the active war, an estimated 10.7 million people in Ukraine require mine action service, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Mine action service is an operation conducted by the United Nations that implements activities limiting the threats posed by mines, explosive remnants of war, and improvised explosive devices. The statistics-conglomerating platform Statista reports that at least 963 mine-related injuries, including 307 deaths, were reported during the first eighteen months of the Russian invasion.
But the real number is likely higher. At the Izyum hospital, doctors are providing critically needed surgeries to save the lives of people who have been injured by mines. The hospital is now providing free-of-charge prosthetic limbs, an initiative funded by Ukraine’s government and Western allies to deliver some relief to survivors of landmine injuries. Orthopedic doctor Yuri Kuznetsov, 53, is one of those physicians tasked with caring for civilians. According to Kuznetsov, “Usually once a week, we get a patient who is in this situation, sometimes even more often.”
In late July, Kuznetsov spoke with me in his office in Izyum. Outside the room, in a small corridor, civilians sit on rows of chairs fixed to the floor. Some await checkups for common illnesses, while others wear casts on their arms or legs. While they wait for their appointments, medics wheel in an occasional soldier. One lies on a stretcher with a shock blanket over his body. A separate hospital region is reserved just for the wounded men and women fighting to defend Ukraine.
The doctor is well over six feet tall, and squeezes into a small chair behind a wooden desk. His eyes are sunken from exhaustion, and he speaks in a monotone voice about his role at the hospital, where he has been working for 23 years. During his first 14 years of practice, Kuznetsov would not have treated landmine or shrapnel injuries. But since Russia’s illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, in 2014, he has become all too familiar with the work.
“It was easier for all our team because, from 2014, when everything had started, we started facing problems and issues like this when people get injuries as they do now,” explains Kuznetsov. For the doctor, familiarity includes knowing the correct time to amputate an arm or leg and how to treat these wounds so they do not become infected. He adds, “It’s a very long process. To prevent this, we have different kinds of tools, medical and surgical as well. So, drugs, amputation, the level of amputation, after an operational period, it’s also important.”
One of the most recent injuries Kuznetsov treated was that of Lydia Barava Oleksandrivna, a 70-year-old woman from Izyum. Oleksandrivna had stepped on a landmine two weeks earlier, and sits in her hospital bed with her right hand and part of her left arm wrapped in gauze. There is dried blood on her fingers, and her lower body is covered by a green and blue blanket. Her left leg and what remains of her right are wrapped in gauze. She lost everything below her right knee in the explosion.
The small room is filled with four beds; the three others hold two older women and one child, all being treated for illnesses unrelated to the war. The child, a girl around six years old, was crying as she sat in her bed. She was sick with the flu, and her parents held her and tried to comfort her. But the child’s shrieks did little to faze Oleksandrivna as she recounted the incident that had left her partially dismembered.
Oleksandrivna lives near a forest in Izyum that was a battleground during the occupation. Despite Russian soldiers being forced out of the city, the forest is still filled with landmines. Oleksandrivna says she was walking in the forest alone when she stepped on the mine. “There are a lot of different explosion devices in the forest. I didn’t have any thoughts. I wanted only to crawl to the phone and call an ambulance,” she says. “There was a lot of blood, so I put off my trousers and put them on my leg,” attempting to make a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. “It was a feeling of horror. I was terrified.”
Oleksandrivna thought she had waited just 30 minutes for medics to rescue her, but after being treated at the hospital she discovered she had been bleeding out for nearly two hours. When she arrived, Kuznetsov was not sure Oleksandrivna would survive, but two weeks later, she had managed to make progress toward returning home. “I’m fine right now. The healing process goes well right now. I think about my life and my home, and I wish to get home as soon as possible. I don’t want to think about anything bad,” she tells me.
After healing, the 70-year-old will begin physical therapy to progress toward receiving a prosthetic leg, but she is at a loss as to when she will be at a place where she can start to regain mobility, saying, “I don’t know that. I wish it happens as soon as possible. I never had such a situation. That’s why I don’t know.” ❖
Anna Conkling is a freelance journalist based in New York City whose writing focuses on human interest stories and environmental issues. Since the beginning of the Russian invasion, she has been corresponding with Ukrainian students, soldiers, and civilians and writing about them for the Voice and other publications.