Soviet-era attitudes to disability hinder Ukrainian fighters’ recovery ( www.politico.eu )

Injured soldiers face social stigma … and their numbers have soared.

The last thing 20-year-old Ukrainian serviceman Ivan Kosyuk remembered before he woke up in a hospital was medics bandaging his eyes as they evacuated him from the front line. A missile had hit the bunker where he’d been snatching a brief respite.

“I could still see then,” he recalled. “Then I came round and I couldn’t see, I was tied to a bed, I had a tube down my throat... I thought: I’m a prisoner. But then: Why are they treating me, if I’m a prisoner?”

Kosyuk realized he was in the military hospital in the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro. He had to wait another day until the staff told him he had permanently lost his sight.