Dmytro Guzha was returning home with his wife Elena when he felt the explosion beneath his feet – and then nothing.
“After that, I didn’t hear or see anything at all,” the 49-year-old says. He regained consciousness a few minutes later 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 had ripped through his lower half.
The Ukrainian city of Chuhuiv, in the northeastern region of Kharkiv, faced heavy Russian bombardment in the opening weeks of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which started on 24 February 2022. Guzha could see and hear explosions in the air as he and Elena took their ill-fated trip to the bakery.
After the couple, married more than 20 years, had picked up some bread, they started walking the familiar route home. Then Guzha’s life changed forever.
Ukraine is the most mine-contaminated country in the world, with an estimated 23 per cent of its land littered with explosive devices. According to the country’s National Mine Action Authority, an estimated 340 civilians have been killed by exploding landmines since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022, with another 1,195 people injured by.
Earlier this month, mine clearance specialist Chris Garrett died after being critically injured during an incident near Izyum, east Ukraine, after clearing mines in Ukraine for 10 years – having started in 2014 when the conflict in Ukraine’s east between government forces and Russian-backed separatists began.
‘Weeks of nightmare’
After the blast, Guzha tried to call an ambulance, but he couldn’t see anything. His wife managed to make the call, despite heavy injuries to her hip. An ambulance arrived quickly and took them to Chuhuiv hospital.
From the moment they arrived at the city’s hospital, the couple experienced “three weeks of nightmare” due to constant bombardment.
Guzha was told by the doctor that his leg might have to be amputated, and he pleaded for them to try and 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 any supply, without electricity, without water because of constant bombardment”.
It was a daily struggle for doctors to even travel to the hospital to treat people without getting injured themselves.
They realised that they had to get out of the hospital and the city or they risked being trapped there. But the road out of Chuhuiv hospital was under such heavy daily bombardment that people who had been killed on the highway only had their corpses removed from their cars six months later.
‘A miracle escape’
Guzha and his wife managed to evacuate on 7 April in what he describes as a “miracle”. It was the only day there was no bombardment. In fact, he describes it as a “quite sunny, quite bright and beautiful day”.
The couple were taken to Kremenchuk hospital, where doctors were able to save Guzha’s leg. For the first seven months, they replaced 20 centimetres of his leg with a metal plate.
“Every time I make a step or I’m trying to make a step, it sounds like there’s some gravel in the washing machine,” he jokes.
After he was treated, he was told it would take him a year to walk again. Two and a half years on from his injuries, he and his wife now live in Kremenchuk and spend “pretty much all the time we have” in hospital.
Not only do they continue to recover from their physical injuries, but their psychological ones as well. Guzha has nightmares every day about what he went through.
He reflects on his time in Chuhuiv hospital, where, after all his injuries, he “couldn’t sleep for the first 10 days at all, then the next year after that, I had nightmares every single night”.
‘I lost sight on the spot’
Guzha isn’t the only person who suffers nightmares because of a landmine attack. After surviving a landmine attack in 2019, Dmytro Slepkan, 30, would see his dead colleague in his dreams.
The former commander for the State Emergency Service’s pyrotechnics unit was left permanently blind by a landmine his squad had tried to de-mine in the Donetsk region.
“I lost sight on the spot,” he says. “All I saw was some red and black emptiness. I felt like I was falling down into some hole.
“I thought this is what death felt like.”
Slepkan struggled to readjust to the world following his injury, and was left in a state of “despair” as he struggled to get a job.
He now works for the Association of Minesweepers of Ukraine as a mine victim assistant. His previous experience means he intimately understands how a person who has been through a mining injury might feel.
Last year, Slepkan became a father to a baby boy, Henadii. While he and his wife Daria live in the “relatively safe city” of Poltava, he continues to worry for his family’s safety.
“That’s the biggest pain in my soul”, he says, “because at my work I get to see a lot of cases where babies and children are getting injured.”
More than 138,000 square kilometres of Ukrainian territory still needs to be surveyed for landmines, covering an area of land the size of Portugal, according to fundraising platform UNITED 24.
The organisation is in the process of raising £1.12m to help de-mine sites across the regions of Kherson, Kyiv and Kharkiv, including schools, hospitals, forests and playgrounds.
Slepkan is determined that no one else should have to go through what he has experienced.
“Our activity is not just a simple activity, it’s the mission to make Ukraine safe, and sooner or later we’re going to do it,” he says. “I want none of the kids in the world to ever know what an air raid is, what war is, what explosions are.”
