"I wanted to die. I sat there and thought: ‘Why the hell did I survive?’" Without a leg and fingers, but with a desire to return to war

"Reinforcement of the infantry"

Before the full-scale invasion, Blaho worked as a manager of a car rental company in Kyiv. He has no family members in the military, and he did not initially plan to serve.

In March 2022, when the Russians were approaching Kyiv, he took his girlfriend, mother, and grandmother to the border area in western Ukraine. He thought about leaving himself. At the military registration and enlistment office in Kyiv, he was told that they did not need people yet, but he did not want to go to the east.

The military at the border asked me:

“Where are you going?”

“I'm getting out of here.”

“But why?”

“I wanted to defend Kyiv, but they told me there’s no need.”

“No need there, but we need you here.”

“But please, not in Donbas."

Blaho decided to join the army, but first he married his girlfriend on March 9. And the same evening he went to the training ground. On March 12, at night, there was an air raid alert, and the soldiers were brought down to the basement. Missiles hit the barracks where the guys lived.

"We spent a day in the woods, and then we were evacuated to Kyiv, and then they said that we would be in the presidential brigade. I didn't even know it existed."

From March to August, he was in training, and then he was sent to Donetsk Oblast.

"We were like a reinforcement of the infantry. If the enemy's armored vehicles came, we would repel them, and if our guys were attacking, we would cover them."

Less than a month later, Blaho suffered his first light injury when a piece of shrapnel hit his armpit and missed his lung by a few millimeters. He was sent to Kyiv for three months. He was wounded again on June 8, 2023. This time he was seriously injured.

"I was torn apart, and my brother-in-arms was splashed with my blood"

“We'll move on to the leg now," says rehabilitation therapist Bohdan. "Do you have the strength?”

"I have strength here," Blaho points to his surviving leg, "and here," he touches the stump, "are the remnants”.

Bohdan puts a black elastic band on the stump, with a weight attached to the other end. The stump is supposed to pull the elastic toward itself. This is how he trains his muscles. He tenses up and squeezes his eyes shut.

"The incoming strike happened so fast that I didn't even have time to react. I look and see a piece of bone sticking out, and my leg feels like it's unwound. I thought: ‘No leg, sh*t’. And then I see that there are no fingers either: ‘Now that's not good’," he recalls his first thoughts upon impact.

Then a shell from an infantry fighting vehicle hit Blaho. It was the beginning of the presidential brigade's offensive on the Maryinka axis.

"We pushed back the vanguard of the Russians' position, it was a parallel landing to ours, and there was another landing perpendicular to it. We pushed them back, they fled and the shelling started."

The commanders, he says, promised that there would be fire cover during the offensive, but there was none: "It's not just us, it's everywhere. We had a lot of guys KIA. There were two flanks, we did not advance at all on ours, and on the right flank there were guys who had normal command – they cleared 8 kilometers.

Upon the incoming strike, my first sensations were that I was immediately thirsty due to blood loss. Then a brother-in-arms sat next to me at the entrance to the dugout, one step down. I was torn up, and he was only splashed with my blood. I thought: ‘Well, I guess no more fighting for me’, but it turned out that was not the case."

"I thought: ‘Why the hell did I survive?’"

The rehabilitation session ends, and Blaho hops to the exit of the center. The rehabilitation therapist takes a wheelchair outside. The soldier sits on the chair, pushes off with one leg and slowly moves to the car.

He stops in front of the trunk, gets up, folds the wheelchair and puts it in the car, and then hops into the driver's seat. The photographer and I offer to help, but Blaho refuses. He has learned to move around almost without assistance. Nevertheless, the path to accepting himself with an injury was a long one. 

"I regained consciousness when they were sawing off a bone in my leg. It was very painful, but I couldn't even open my eyes." Then there was intensive care in Dnipro and the absence of any sensations: "When they put an Ilizarov apparatus on my arm, I realized that the pain I had felt before was nothing compared to this."

In Kyiv, the guy started cleaning his leg daily. Due to the infection, his thigh was shortened by a few more centimeters. At first, Blaho got really angry.

"I wanted to die. I sat and thought: "Why the hell did I survive?"

"If I survived, then I must be here for a reason"

More than a year has passed since his injury, and his emotional state is gradually improving.

"Now I think: if I survived, then I must be here for a reason."

However, everything he used to do before the invasion – sports, hiking, physical work – is no longer relevant. He plans to raise money for a bionic prosthetic arm and return to the front as a drone pilot.

"I believe that if you are in the military, you have to stay there until the end. My mom, of course, had a hysteria when she found out about my injury, so she is not happy that I decided to return to the war. It is boring to sit here. I hope they will take me to aerial reconnaissance. I miss this hustle. I'm even starting to get scared. When there were hits at Okhmatdyt, my wife and I were sitting near the entrance, and air defense systems were operating overhead. My pulse immediately jumped. I thought: ‘That's it, I'm turning into a civilian. Good grief’."

You can help Blaho raise funds for a bionic prosthetic arm by donating to his monobank jar

This piece was created with the support of the German Federal Foreign Office.