Seriously injured Ukrainian soldiers are staying in Groningen for medical treatment and rehabilitation. Lieutenant Alexey Mashlyatin can’t wait to go back to the front. “If I don’t go, who will?”
The first minutes after Alexey Mashlyatin (38) is shot, he feels no pain. He notices from the blood that flows down his back and legs that something is very wrong. When he turns around, his leg is at an unnatural angle. As the trench in which he is hiding comes under fire from Russian artillery, he crawls away from the front line. He can no longer walk. It is the end of January and it is freezing 15 degrees.
After two hours he is picked up and taken to a field hospital. He has to leave his two company mates lifeless in the trench.
Small steps
Four months later, Mashlyatin watches from his bed in the Maartenshof rehabilitation center in Groningen out on the courtyard. It’s a sunny day in May, old ladies shuffle past his window behind their walkers. Mashlyatin wears an army green T-shirt with the text in Ukrainian: “Russian warship, go fuck yourself .
‘Russian warship, drop dead’
Shortly after the Russian invasion, two Russian warships, the Moscow and the Vasily Bykov , the Ukrainian Snake Island. Thirteen Ukrainian border guards were stationed on this tiny island at the time. Via radio messages, the crew of the Moskva demanded that the inhabitants of the island lay down their weapons and allow themselves to be captured. Border guard replied Roman Hrybov ‘Russian warship, drop dead’.
Although the Russian military subsequently captured the island, the border guards survived the incident. Some of them were later released in a prisoner exchange. Hrybov’s radio message, in English’ Russian warship, go fuck yourself ‘, became a winged statement in Ukraine and ended up on an official stamp, among other things. According to Alexey Mashlyatin, variants of this statement are also shouted at the Russian troops at the front.
Since April 20, he has been in the rehabilitation ward of the care center to recover from the damage caused by red-hot shrapnel in his right leg. He has physiotherapy twice a day. “I’ve been able to take a few steps again without a walker or crutches for a few days now,” he says with a faint smile. “The recovery literally goes in small steps, but there is improvement. When I got here, I couldn’t even bend my knee.”
Multitrauma
The war with Russia puts a lot of pressure on hospital care in Ukraine. Seriously injured soldiers and civilians therefore receive medical help in other European countries. Many soldiers suffer from multi-trauma, several serious injuries at the same time.
So is Mashlyatin, whose leg and gluteal muscles are severely affected. “In Ukraine, hospitals are bursting at the seams, there is no time for the right treatments. A fellow soldier who also sustained a leg wound was given a choice: if you stay here, we’ll amputate your leg, or you go to Germany where they might still be able to save it. That choice was made quickly.”
Complex disorders
At the request of Ukraine, the European Commission has asked all its member states to receive patients. Civilians and soldiers who need acute or specialist care are eligible for a medical evacuation, says Michel Huiberts of the National Coordination Center for Patient Distribution (LCPS). “If the local hospitals cannot find a solution themselves, the Ukrainian government will ask Brussels to evacuate the injured. About twenty to forty requests are received every week and are distributed across Europe.”
So far, 136 injured Ukrainians have been treated in the Netherlands. The applications are assessed in the Netherlands by medical experts from the LCPS. “Based on the limited medical data we receive, an estimate is made. Can we treat this person? Is the trip to the Netherlands possible in this condition? A place to stay must also be available for patients who are treated on an outpatient basis. If we can receive someone, we will report this to Brussels. Usually we can make an assessment within three days.”
In line for the operating room
Because permission is often required for a medical evacuation from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense – more than half of the wounded are conscripts – the first treatments are carried out in Ukraine. Mashlyatin is also first operated in his home country. The day he is injured, he is taken to four different hospitals. There he lies with five fellow soldiers in the corridor in front of an operating room. Only in the fourth hospital are the shrapnel removed from his leg.
From Poland he is brought to the Netherlands a month later. Specialist care is needed that the Ukrainian hospitals cannot offer him. With a Norwegian plane in which twenty stretchers are mounted, he and a group of fellow soldiers are scattered across Europe. After landings in Poland and France, Mashlyatin arrives in the Netherlands.
Peace before family
Once in the UMCG, Mashlyatin is frequently visited by Ukrainians from Groningen, who bring food for him. On the table next to his hospital bed is a pack of Ukrainian cigarettes, the dessert next to it also has a label in Cyrillic script. “They feel responsible for their compatriots who have been injured, but they are also curious. As a soldier coming straight from the front, I know more than what they hear from friends and family.”
Mashlyatin’s mother has also been in the Netherlands for a number of weeks. “She is staying in the emergency shelter for refugees and visits me every day. After my injuries, I know how important the time we can spend together is.”
His wife and two children fled the war early on, after the family spent a week holed up in the air raid shelter of their apartment complex in Kyiv. He calls them every day, says Maslyatin. “They are with my wife’s relatives in Australia. It’s tough, I haven’t held my kids in my arms for a year, but they’re safe there.”
Back to the front
Despite the loss and his injuries, Maslyatin, who worked as a lawyer in business life before the war, focuses on only one thing: to return to the front as soon as possible. “If I don’t go, who will?” As he talks about the fighting, he looks unfazed, but appearances can be deceiving. He calls his first gunfight a surreal experience.
“The first time you lose a friend you don’t know what hit you. The speed at which it happens is unimaginable, one minute you are talking to each other and shortly afterwards that person is no longer there. You have to close yourself off to that, if you let everything come to your heart you will go crazy. There are men who cannot do that, they are now in a psychiatric hospital. I can do it. It’s work and someone has to do it. Besides, I’m an officer. If I lose my mind fighting, it will be chaos and even more people will die.”
Sense of responsibility
It is difficult to estimate how great the chances of a full recovery are. “Every day I feel my hip and leg improve a little bit, but my foot remains bad,” says Maslyatin. Due to nerve damage, his right foot is swollen and painful. “It’s too unstable, I can’t walk on it.” His biggest fear is being rejected from the military. “I don’t really even want to think about that. I have to go back, I cannot stand idly by.”
The sense of responsibility among Ukrainian soldiers is great, Michel Huiberts of the LCPS also sees. “Virtually all soldiers return to fight.”
Maslyatin does not want to convalesce in Australia, where his wife and children are. “As soon as I have recovered enough, I want to go back to Ukraine to fight. I see my family again in a free and safe Kyiv.”
Accountability
This article is a collaboration with Ukrainian journalist Alla Filatova-Suhova (40), reporter and editor for the news website Gorod.cn.ua in the city of Chernihiv. After the outbreak of war, she fled to the Netherlands. Since then she has been staying in an emergency shelter in Drenthe with her dog Willy. Her husband stayed behind in Ukraine to fight in the Air Force. From the Netherlands she publishes about her flight for various Ukrainian media and is working on a book.