How Russia portrays wounded soldiers: as heroes, or not at all

A grenade struck the ground just a few meters away from where the Russian soldier was stationed and the explosion threw him into the air.

“I felt my arm fall off, then a blow to my leg, everything slowed down, just a frozen image in my eyes – no sounds, no other sensations,” said the soldier, Andrei, a 29-year-old former convict who was recruited into the private military company Wagner.

As he regained consciousness, he was convinced death was imminent, he said in an interview, asking that only his first name be used for fear of retaliation by Russian authorities. As grenades exploded on all sides during the fighting near the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, fellow soldiers dragged him to an evacuation point. He ended up spending more than a year in hospitals, with the remains of his left arm amputated and one leg still in danger.

Cases like Andrei's are not widely publicized in Russia, where – as in Ukraine – the total number of war wounded is not disclosed. But according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials and numerous military analysts, the number is staggering, perhaps in the hundreds of thousands. And a senior Russian official estimated that amputees represented more than half of the seriously injured.

Because reporters and aid groups have little or no access to hospitals or rehabilitation centers in Russia, information is scarce, often limited to community news reports and Telegram channels.

The Kremlin, military analysts and some medical personnel say, wants to avoid a repeat of the anti-war movements that ended previous wars in Chechnya and Afghanistan.

“The Russian state has learned from experience that if it wants to maintain domestic stability, it must suppress those kinds of debates,” said Nick Reynolds, a land warfare researcher at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based military think tank. .

Military analysts say the high number of wounded also reflects the striking indifference Russia is showing towards its soldiers as it sacrifices huge numbers to make small gains across the 900 kilometer front in Ukraine.

“The Russian leadership at all levels does not care much about soldiers,” said Pavel Luzin, a Russian military expert at the Center for European Policy Analysis, a Washington-based research group.

Wounded veterans are not completely ignored. They are occasionally seen on state television in the service of war propaganda, invariably giving an upbeat account of how they are easily adapting to life with their injuries, including missing limbs.

On rare occasions, President Vladimir V. Putin visits the wounded in hospitals, pinning medals to their crisp, cobalt blue military pajamas. He sometimes acknowledges problems in the system and invariably promises solutions.

“As for prosthetics, there is still a lot to do,” Putin said last month talking to veterans. He had recently learned, he added, that former soldiers with prosthetics were receiving lower government payments, which he called “unacceptable.”

After the first month of the war, Russian Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu announced that there were 3,825 wounded, a figure that Russia never updated. Therefore, estimates of the number of wounded from both sides are extrapolated based on the number of deaths, which already involves a lot of guesswork.

William J. Burns, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, wrote in one article Last month, the Foreign Office published that there were 315,000 Russian dead and wounded.

When contacted, numerous doctors, veterans or family members refused to talk about the wounded, fearing they would violate Russian laws against releasing confidential information or disparaging the military, not to mention endangering their jobs or benefits. Some who spoke declined to use their full names.

Several interviews revealed that the main goal of treating the wounded was to quickly relocate them to the front. There is a shortage of medical discharges, analysts and medical staff said, underscoring the desperate need for soldiers, with the Defense Ministry preferring to recycle the wounded rather than undertake another unpopular mobilization.

Dmitri, 35, was mobilized in September 2022. He said his first gruesome taste of war came two months later, when a drone dropped a grenade on a nearby dugout containing 10 men. “Arms were torn off, a helmet with a brain on it, and a man's leg was torn off, although not completely torn off,” he recalled in an interview. “I wasn't ready for that. Nobody was.”

Last summer, Dmitri suffered shrapnel wounds from a drone strike that sent him to a hospital just inside Russia, he said. He counted about 400 patients in his department, and 150 seriously injured people in another department. With about 80 patients each, the doctors initially spent less than five minutes per soldier, he said: “It was an assembly line.”

Because Dmitri's injuries were relatively minor, no one examined him for two days, after which a doctor passed a magnet over his wounds. When it failed to respond, he was given a shot of disinfectant and a few bandages before being discharged and told to report back to the front six days later.

“I was in shock” by the instructions, said Dmitri, who fled Russia with help the Georgia-based organization Go by the Forest.

Many of the stories from doctors and the injured suggest that Russia lacks the essentials for treatment – ​​from enough evacuation vehicles to hospital beds and medicine. The military operates a network of about 150 medical facilities across the country, including an advanced medical academy in St. Petersburg and several specialized hospitals in Moscow.

The Russian Defense Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

Some veterans praised what they called their prompt, thorough care, but it could seem like they had won the lottery. Artem Katulin, head of a combat medicine training program, told the official news agency RIA Novosti Last year it emerged that more than half of war deaths were the result of injuries that were not life-threatening and improperly tied tourniquets accounted for a third of amputations.

Maxim Lukashevsky, a surgeon who volunteered at a hospital at the front and is now working again in Moscow, said in an interview that on a busy day he could treat about 45 wounded people in five hours, including up to five amputations.

A young Russian named Regina did just that published a diary on social media documenting the highs and lows of caring for her husband, Denis, who was hospitalized in St. Petersburg for more than a year missing part of his brain.

She relies on crowdfunding for everything from adult diapers to a high-tech wheelchair. While she praised the dedication of the medical staff, she criticized the lack of tailor-made rehabilitation programs.

“I feel like I'm putting my loved one together like a puzzle,” she wrote. In another post, she noted: “I was so angry at how terrible everything was in terms of individual rehabilitation prescriptions; I was just shaking with resentment.”

About 54 percent of injured veterans classified as disabled have undergone amputations, says Aleksei Vovchenko, Russia's Deputy Minister of Labor and Social Protection, testified before a government committee in October, without giving an overall figure.

A traumatologist working in Siberia said many permanently disabled young veterans had damaged organs or shattered joints. Although Russia builds prosthetic limbs, joint replacements are elusive because they were largely imported before the war, he and others said.

The traumatologist and others noted a clear lack of public compassion for the seriously injured. Amputees now appear on the streets begging for money, he said, and there are few facilities such as wheelchair ramps.

Even Anton Filimonov, Russia's poster child for the optimistic amputee — he lost a leg by stepping on a landmine — said at a public forum in St. Petersburg last year that Russians were “not ready” to see amputees.

The flow of injured people is likely to continue, military experts say. The losses have not prompted the armed forces to “change their fighting to this very attritive, infantry-led, frontal attack style,” said Karolina Hird, a Russia analyst at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.

Andrei, Wagner's recruit, was a construction worker from near Rostov who had served about three years of an eight-year prison sentence for seriously injuring someone during a bar brawl. He trained for two weeks before being pushed to the front line, and was soon seriously injured.

Because all the nerves and veins in his left arm were destroyed, it was amputated. Doctors recommended replacing his badly damaged left knee, but he was discharged in a wheelchair last month. He still supports the war.

Originally, Andrei was left-handed, but he had to learn to depend on his right hand. Although a microprocessor moves the fingers of his prosthetic arm, he has a simple mechanical elbow, so he can hold a glass but cannot lift one to his lips.

“Honestly, it's not a comfortable situation,” he said.

Audio produced by Patricia Sulbarán.

Alina Lobzina, Oleg Matsnev And Helene Kuiper reporting contributed.