Sasha Horokhivskyi (38) undergoes mirror therapy to alleviate phantom pain (in which part of an amputated limb seems to be hurting), at a public hospital in Kyiv, Ukraine. Sasha lost his leg above the knee on 22 March, after being shot in the calf by a member of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces who mistook him for a spy, after he stopped to take photographs of bombed buildings near his home in Bobrovytsya, in northern Ukraine.
This story portrays people who have undergone amputations as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The photographer, who lost a leg reporting in Afghanistan, feels a camaraderie with the amputees, and strives to depict the cruelty of war behind the front lines. While territory can be surrendered and regained, the loss of a limb, like the loss of a life, is permanent.
Figures in the Russia-Ukraine war are hard to verify, but reports in international media point to shelling, air strikes, and explosions caused by mines all leading to amputations. Nazar Bahniuk, a prosthetist working in a hospital in Lviv, in western Ukraine, told a Voice of America reporter that although most of his patients were soldiers from battle zones in the east, around a quarter were civilians. Overall, the UN Human Rights Office recorded 21,580 civilian casualties in Ukraine in the year following the outbreak of war, but believes the real number to be considerably higher.
