Yarik Stepanenko (11) helps his twin sister Yana, at a public hospital in Lviv, Ukraine. Yarik and Yana, together with their mother Natasha, were injured during shelling of a train station in the eastern city of Kramatorsk, on 8 April. According to the UN Human Rights Office, some 60 civilians were killed, and 110 wounded in a Russian missile strike on the station. Thousands of civilians were gathered there, awaiting evacuation. Russia denied involvement, claiming the strike was orchestrated by Ukraine. The family were later flown to San Diego, in the United States, where Yana and Natasha, who lost her left leg in the attack, received new prostheses, and Yarik underwent surgery.
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.
