“This is how death feels”: The terrible reality of the Ukraine country mini crisis

DMytro Guzha returned home with his wife Elena when he felt the explosion under his feet – and then nothing.

“After that I didn't hear or saw anything at all,” says the 49-year-old. A few minutes later he regained consciousness and his focus turned to Elena.

“I was really worried about my wife because I saw her and she didn't move. Then I wanted to try to get closer to her, but I couldn't because my leg didn't move.” That was the result of the explosion that his lower half had torn through.

The Ukrainian city Chuhuiv in the northeastern region of Kharkiv in the first few weeks of Vladimir Putin's invasion to Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022, was strongly Russian bombing.

After the couple, who had been married for more than 20 years, had recorded some bread, they started going home the familiar route. Then Guzha's life changed forever.

Ukraine is the most min -contaminated country in the world, with an estimated 23 percent of its country, which is littered with explosive bodies. According to the country's National Mine Authority, an estimated 340 civilians were killed by exploded land mines since the full invasion of Russia began in 2022, with a further 1,195 people being injured.

At the beginning of this month, Chris Garrett, specialist for mining freedom, after he was critically injured in an incident near Izyum, eastern Ukraine, died after he had clarified mines in the east of Ukraine between state forces and Russia supported for 10 years.

“Weeks of the nightmare”

After the explosion, Guzha tried an ambulance, but he couldn't see anything. His wife managed to make the call, despite serious injuries to her hip. An ambulance arrived quickly and brought them to the chuhuiv hospital.

From the moment they arrived in the city hospital, the couple experienced “three weeks of nightmare” due to the constant bombing.

Guzha was informed by the doctor that his leg may have to be amputated, and he advocated trying to save it.

“Just try to do something,” he asked the doctor. “Because you can always cut it off, it's the easiest thing to do, but try to do something.”

For three weeks they stayed in the hospital “without doctors, without electricity without electricity, without water due to constant bombing”.

It was a daily fight for doctors to even travel to the hospital to treat people without hurt themselves.

They realized that they had to get out of the hospital and the city or risk them to be caught there. However, the street from the Chuhuiv Hospital was with such a daily bombing that people who were killed on the highway were only removed from their cars by their cars six months later.

“A miracle escape”

Guzha and his wife managed to evacuate on April 7, which he calls “miracle”. It was the only day when there was no bombing. In fact, he describes it as a “fairly sunny, fairly bright and beautiful day”.

The couple was taken to the Kremenchuk Hospital, where doctors were able to save Guzha's leg. In the first seven months, they replaced 20 centimeters of their leg with a metal plate.

“Every time I take a step or try to take a step, it sounds as if there is some gravel in the washing machine,” he jokes.

After he was treated, he was told that he would need a year to run again. Two and a half years after his injuries, he and his wife now live in Kremenchuk and spend “pretty much the time we have in the hospital”.

They not only continue to recover from their physical injuries, but also from their psychological ones. Guzha has nightmares every day about what he went through.

He reflects his time in the Chuhuiv Hospital, where after all his injuries “he couldn't sleep at all for the first 10 days, then I had nightmares every night next year”.

“I lost sight of it”

Guzha is not the only person who suffers due to a landmine attack on the nightmares. After Dmytro Slepkan (30) survived a land mine attack in 2019, he saw his dead colleague in his dreams.

The former commander for the pyrotechnics unit of the state emergency service was permanently blind by a country mine that his squad in the Donetsk region.

“I immediately lost sight of,” he says. “Everything I saw was a red and black emptiness. I felt like I was falling into a hole.

“I thought that death felt like that.”

After his injury, Slepkan tried to adapt to the world and was left behind in a state of “despair” when he tried to get a job.

He is now working for the Association of Minenswepers of Ukraine as an assistant to the mine victims. His earlier experience means that he understands how a person who has gone through a mining injury could feel.

Last year Slepkan became the father of a little boy, Henadii. While he and his wife Daria live in the “relatively safe city” of Poltava, he continues to worry about the safety of his family.

“This is the greatest pain in my soul,” he says, “because I see many cases in my work where babies and children are injured.”

For landmines, more than 138,000 square kilometers of the Ukrainian area must be interviewed, which cover an area with the size of Portugal, according to the Fundraising Platform United 24.

The organization is currently collecting 1.12 million GBP to support the Mine locations in the Kherson, Kyiv and Kharkiv regions, including schools, hospitals, forests and playgrounds.

Slepkan is determined that no one else has to go through what he has experienced.

“Our activity is not just a simple activity, it is the mission to make Ukraine safe, and sooner or later we will do it,” he says. “I want none of the children of the world ever know what kind of air raid, what war is, what explosions are.”