A veteran's new mission: Mykola's shrimp farming dream to fund prosthetic legs after losing his in battle

Warrior Mykola Tarasenko sustained severe injuries and multiple traumas on the third day of the full-scale war. This was followed by the amputation of both legs. Mykola was barely 19 years old at the time. After a lengthy rehabilitation, the veteran, who was a child not so long ago, had to decide how and what to do with his life.

For the sixth child in a family where the father had died and the mother was seriously ill, these were particularly difficult questions. In the hospital, he accidentally came across a video about breeding giant river shrimp. He liked the idea. In September 2023, Mykola became a shrimp farmer. He hopes that shrimp will help him earn money for bionic prostheses.

"Mechanical prostheses squeeze my groin – it feels like my pelvis is breaking out. It is very painful to use them. That's why I want bionic ones: to walk freely and live more freely," Mykola explains.

To meet the guy and see his shrimp, hromadske travelled to Zhytomyr Oblast.

Wounded... after battle

After school, Mykola studied to become a gas and electric welder and started earning his own money. Employees of the district military enlistment office openly told him to stop "reveling" and join military service. Instead, Mykola signed a contract with the Zhytomyr paratroopers of the 95th Brigade. It was October 2021.

Then he was sent to the 80th Brigade in Lviv Oblast to practice combat coordination. Either Mykola had gotten used to the army or the new commanders were more humane than the previous ones, but after a month or two, it became easier to serve.

Shortly before the full-scale invasion, he found himself in Mykolaiv Oblast. From there, on the night of February 24, 2022, they were deployed to Nova Kakhovka. By the time they got there, the Russians had already occupied the town.

According to Mykola, the "newbies" from the 95th Brigade, were joined by experienced soldiers from the 80th Brigade mortar crews. But the battle was so hard that after it, the battalion was left with just over 100 fighters.

"I came out of that battle in one piece. I told my sister on the phone that I was alive, that we were being turned back to Mykolaiv, because the Russians were approaching. 

But I did not get to Mykolaiv. Near the village of Shylova Balka, a Russian helicopter fired at our vehicle. [A shell] landed right under my feet. Plus our own shell detonated near me. 

It's strange: the guys sitting next to me, 20 of us in that vehicle, were fine. I took the brunt of the impact," Mykola recalls.

The blast wave threw him onto a mortar. He suffered a brain contusion, a broken jaw and nose, and displacement of the skull bones; the back plate of the armor injured his spine. Most importantly, the explosion shattered his legs.

"I was unconscious for seven days. I don't remember how I was transported from Mykolaiv to Vinnytsia hospital, how my amputation was performed. Generally speaking, the first month after the injury was in a fog – I was constantly given morphine because I was screaming in pain. When I recovered a bit, I saw guys lying next to me in the ward without legs. I touched myself – I had a plaster cast on my head, a device for fixing bones. And very severe pain in my legs – it took me a while to realize that it was phantom pain," Mykola recalls.

He is sure that his amputation was performed by someone not very experienced: the nerve fibers were stitched together after the operation so that Mykola was simply doomed to unbearable phantom pains. Later, he traveled to Dnipro to have those fibers adjusted during another surgery. It got a little better, but only a little.

Vika, Mykola's sister, complains: "These phantom pains also make it difficult for him to use mechanical prostheses. He walks on them for 10-15 minutes, and then just can't anymore".

One team

Vika and her husband Mykhailo are now the most important people in Mykola's life. His mother is suffering from rheumatism, and she can't take care of Mykola anymore. The rest of his sisters and brother live in other towns and villages, and some of them live abroad. They visit him once or twice and then return to their concerns. "They don't really seem to care where I am, and what I am doing. They take care of themselves; somehow it doesn't work out for us..." says Mykola.

Vika has been the closest to him since childhood: she is 9 years older than Mykola, she took care of him when he was a kid, and now he is in her arms.

It was Vika who visited him in the hospital and rehabilitation centers – to bathe, entertain, help get used to prosthetics. It was she who took it upon herself to renew his passport and military ID card, which were lost after the wound. She ran between Zhytomyr and Lviv, collecting references for prosthetics, establishing the 1st group of disability, and formalizing the relevant cash benefits. It was Vika who listened to rude remarks in institutions and hours waiting outside numerous offices for the coveted signatures and stamps. She carried Mykola in her arms to those offices when officials demanded his immediate presence.

At that time, she was sickened by people's indifference and rigidity. She will never forget taking Mykola's picture for his military ID card. His wheelchair did not fit through the doors of the photo studio, so Vika had to carry her brother in her arms. The photographer didn't even move to help. Although he refused to take money for the photos.

"Did those 200 hryvnias ($5) make a difference? It would have been better if he had helped me pick Mykola up from the low chair," Vika recalls bitterly.

It was Vika's house that Mykola asked to live in when his ordeal with hospitals and rehabilitation was over. He told his sister about his new dream – to grow shrimp. Vika was excited about her brother's plans: she didn't want him to be gloomy in idleness and lose faith in himself.

Mykola turned to the Ukrainian Shrimp company and asked them to teach him how to set up a farm. The director, Oleksiy Slepnyov, a former soldier himself, came to Mykola's village and held a personal seminar for him. He told him how to build premises for the farm; what to feed the shrimp; how to filter water for them and what to do to prevent the crustaceans from eating each other.

Before his injury, Mykola was 187 centimeters tall – he was a tall, strong guy. His amputation is almost to the groin. Sitting down is uncomfortable for him. Nowadays, he can deftly transfer himself to an electric wheelchair or a sofa, keep the farm in order, go fishing and even repair the chair himself. When he first started talking about the farm, Mykola was still completely helpless.

At that time, Vika and Mykhailo had a lot of trouble with him. And they still had to go to work. Plus the farm! Mykola could not hire someone else to build and equip the farm premises as he did not have the money for it. The only hope was on Vika and Mykhailo. They did their best. They managed to stretch the day so that they had enough time for their work, their daughter, their mother, as well as Mykola and his farm.

They cut down old trees in the garden and uprooted stumps. On the cleared area, Mykhailo built a house; set up pools (water is pumped from a well); and built a stove to heat the premises and water. He tells me about the help of his brother-in-law, who shyly leaves the room and only smiles when I call him "deputy production director."

Manicure and temperature conditions

But on the farm itself, Mykhailo got talking: "You can see how the shed is insulated from the inside – like a thermos. I used corrugated board, foil, and cotton wool for this purpose. The temperature inside can hold for a day. Shrimp need 26 degrees Celsius to grow." 

Meanwhile, Mykola deftly maneuvers his chair among the pools. He notes that shrimp also need darkness, but especially for me, Vika and Mykhailo removed the black film from the pools so that I could see these beauties.

Last fall, Oleksiy Slepnyov, Mykola's mentor, brought shrimp larvae (about 2,500 of them). They didn't even look like living creatures then. "They were just little black dots floating in the water," Vika says. Since then, the shrimp have grown quite a bit. Now they are kept in two pools: by spring, they will have grown and gained maximum weight, and then Mykola will hand them over to the Ukrainian Shrimp company for sale. In the meantime, the whole family takes care of the shrimp like small children. They filter the water for them, clean the pools with a special vacuum cleaner, and prepare a nutritious menu.

"We feed them three times a day. We grind fish for them, give them different greens, larvae, worms. They even fight for them. At one point we failed to keep the temperature, it fell to 16 degrees, and some shrimp stunted in growth. You can see that in one pool they are quite small, and here they are already quite big," Mykola shows.

They are not just big, they are beautiful. They try to hide from the bright light among the plastic boxes thrown into the pool.

Mykhailo explains: "The boxes have to take up to 90% of the pool's volume - these are ‘houses’ for shrimp, all crustaceans need some kind of shelter: they hide in them and then eat each other less."

It's not enough for Mykola for me to just look at the shrimp in the water. He catches a few with a net, puts them in his palms, and gets a little disappointed when I refuse to do the same. He holds them in his palms gently, as if they were butterflies that might flutter away. Then he gently drops them into the water.

"We didn't eat any of these shrimps, they are still growing," he assures me.

Mykola takes a vacuum cleaner to show me how to clean the pool – he sticks its tube into the water, and suddenly a giant shrimp with huge, menacing claws (twice as big as its body!) crawls out of the nearest "house". "Whoa!" I exclaim with delight.

"We cut off these claws with tongs so that they don't tear each other," Vika explains. "So we catch each one with a net and do a 'manicure'." 

I didn't manage to take a picture of the shrimp I liked so much as the nimble creature instantly hid among the boxes.

"This batch of shrimp is a trial batch, we are just learning how to grow them. In the spring we will get new larvae, and then everything will be ‘for real’," Mykola says.

He has already gotten the hang of keeping the farm organized. What seemed like a fantasy last year turned out to be a very real project.

The veteran shares: "My family, some private entrepreneurs, and veterans' organizations helped me a lot. They helped me with money and equipment. They believed in me, because it's a lot of money. And I have to beg for payments for my injuries and participation in combat operations, and I still haven't received them in full."

Now he plans to expand the farm. He needs to think about water for additional pools as the old well will not suffice. He also wants to buy more powerful equipment. Right now, he hasn't yet calculated how many years it will take to raise money for bionic prostheses, their maintenance abroad, his trips there, and support for them with the help of shrimp. He is still "at square one".

The sensitive issues

Mykola's village is quite large. There are plenty of young people here so he should not feel lonely. But he lives in different worlds with his local peers.

"After I came home from the hospital, no one has talked to me at all, except for one of my friends. I'm in a wheelchair and I'm going down the street, and very few people say hello. but I don't care about them lot – I communicate with my guys whom I met in the hospital. I have friends on social networks – boys and girls. I have never met them, but I am interested in talking to them," Mykola says.

I mentally select the words to ask him about something sensitive. But he gets ahead of me and says that the main thing for him now is to grow the farm. He does not care much about his personal life. Many of his acquaintances were abandoned by their wives when they found out about their injuries! He speaks harshly and categorically, as only a 21-year-old young man with a sick soul can speak. And I remember how tenderly Mykola held shrimp in his palm, and I think that he could touch a girl's hand with such tenderness. Somewhere there is a girl who would give him her hand.

If you would like to support Mykola's fundraising for bionic prostheses, here are his bank card details:

5168 7456 8641 1569 - PrivatBank;

5375 4141 3220 7712 - monobank.