“I cried when I looked in the mirror”

THE FACE OF WAR: They survived Putin’s meat grinder

LVIV–DNIPRO. Their faces will forever bear the scars of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.

But plastic surgeons from all over the world are fighting to restore them as much as they can.

They are called the Undefeated.

For those burned, shot and blown to pieces, the fight for a normal life continues in the hospital corridors:

– We are Ukrainians, we are Cossacks, we will survive, says musician Mykhaylo Potyshniak, 56, who lost a large part of his scalp – and part of his family – in the war.

Mykhaylo’s head is wrapped like a cauliflower in a fridge. A tube drains the head of what shouldn’t be there to prevent complications and blood clots. The face bears traces of deep scars and several operations.
On his stomach, an even bigger scar recalls how his entrails once hung outside his stomach and were born back.

– When my house blew up and the wall and roof collapsed, I felt fire in my head, Mykhaylo Potyshniak remembers.

The musician’s family lived in a small community in the Kherson region when the Russians bombed it last August. His eldest son managed to get him out of the flames and debris.

Mykhaylo was convinced he would die in there.

– It took a month and a half before the hospital staff told me that my wife was not in another room, but that she died on the spot, Mykhaylo remembers. His younger son also died in the attack.

For the first two weeks after the attack, he has no memory of anything other than the fire that continued to haunt his nightmares.
– The first time I saw myself in the mirror, I cried for several weeks, says Mykhaylo.

Now he has a type of composite material that, once mixed, can be molded and then solidifies in the crushed rind.

We meet him at the Saint Ponteleymona hospital in Lviv in northwestern Ukraine. Mykhaylo’s doctors believe it will be another couple of years before they can seriously move on to pure plastic surgery to give him a new face.

Here, as in some other hospitals in Ukraine, those with the most severe injuries end up requiring first life-saving care and then many and long interventions by plastic surgeons.

– Most people who come here have multiple injuries. We are trying to recreate the soft parts and replace the hard bone pieces, explains Oleg Kovtunyak, head of maxillofacial surgery at the hospital. On a TV screen, he shows the latest interventions he and his colleagues have done. They are difficult and bulky and often require prostheses that are manufactured in three-dimensional printers.

Oleg Kovtunyak especially fears gunshot and shock wave injuries. Just such injuries as the Russian terrorist bombings and the war on the battlefield provide the hospitals with every other day. These are injuries that require months and years of reconstruction in countless surgeries.

For the survivors, it’s about coming to terms with a new face, but also getting used to the looks of the family and the outside world.

– My husband can sit for forty minutes, quietly, and look at himself in the mirror. Then I hear him say “frog” and leave, says Ihor Zakharchenko’s wife Tatiana.

– I was assigned to check a landmine in the gray zone at the front when I was shot at, says Ihor, 51 years old.

Despite the injury that could have killed him in a matter of centimetres, he managed to crawl 70 meters back to his post with his jaw shattered, one shot in the arm and another in the right hand. At the same time, Ihor tries to look at his fate and future positively:

– At my age, it’s mostly about beauty on the inside, not on the outside, he says and tries for a smile.

But the road back can be long, purely mentally, as for his older soldier colleague, Roman Yermolenko, 44 ​​years old, in the same hospital in Lviv. A Russian rocket knocked out his vehicle and he believes himself to be the only survivor.

Roman lost an eye, most of his hearing, several fingers, a leg and suffered injuries to his face. His jaw is now in titanium.

– When I woke up, I felt such an emptiness. I felt that it would have been better if I had also died, he says, but adds:

– Now I feel that I still have to continue living for my children’s sake, he says.

Plastic surgery as a science – and to some extent as an art form – was born after another trench war: the First World War. In Great Britain they spoke of broken faces and in France of gueules cassées. There was also a huge boom in prostheses and various forms of masks. What you couldn’t repair, you tried to hide. But the war damage was also a step forward for legislation on the integration of the disabled into working life.

Today, it is mainly out of solidarity that surgeons from different countries come to Ukraine to help and teach – while they themselves learn a great deal from the severe injuries they have to take care of. Some patients are also sent abroad for complicated procedures.

– It is especially when they need amputations and prostheses that they are sent abroad. But here we can also perform nanosurgery surgery at the level of what is done in the EU and in the USA, says Serhiy Sliesarenko, 60, one of the country’s leading plastic surgeons who works at one of the hospitals in Dnipro. Patients often come there directly from the front after being stabilized on the road from Donetsk. Unfortunately, they lack nurses to be able to perform as many operations as the surgeon would have liked.

The soldier sleeps on a bed at the far end of the corridor, among other debris.
His vehicle had driven at high speed to avoid the bombs around him at the front around Bachmut.

– The driver died, but I survived. I hardly believed it myself, he says.

Soon he hopes to be back in some form of service – but not necessarily on the front lines where he was losing his life.
– In the military, there are many ways to serve Ukraine, he says.

Andrei Daudrich, 45, was one of three crew members of the old Soviet-era T-64 tank that fought outside Bachmut. When the shell went through the turret of the tank, it was a hair’s breadth from his head. After the explosion, everything caught fire, including the lot where they had their own grenades.

Andrej and his commander managed to miraculously get out of the fire. The third crewman died in the flames.

– We made our way back to our position on foot, 700 meters back. I went purely on adrenaline, remembers Andrej, who estimates his burns at 80 percent.

He still wonders why he survived.

– God spared my life. Now I have to prove that I am grateful and worthy of that gift, says the father of two, between two heavy, slightly whistling breaths.

Six shells succeeded Petro Malets avoid as he ran for his life in the night with lights off and night vision goggles over his eyes from the front near Vulhedar. He saw and heard the shells coming closer and closer in the rearview mirror. The seventh shell did not miss. Now he has a titanium implant in his head and an eye that is in the danger zone.

But the Russians did not manage to take away his good mood from the 28-year-old.

– I remember that immediately after the explosion, I looked for my phone, because I wanted to take a selfie. But I didn’t find it, he laments.

– I kind of just thought wow! I managed, he says. His commanding officer has said that if he wants to, he can be released from duty and go back to civilian life after what he’s been through. But the professional military refuses.

– This is my job, he says and grins.