At first, we were in New York, then in New Haven for examinations at Yale—clinic after clinic—and unfortunately, everywhere they said there was still no chance of restoring my vision. However, everyone agreed on one thing: it was necessary to reconstruct the structure of my face to prevent further damage. This reconstruction wasn’t for aesthetics but for functionality: to enable the placement of eye prostheses, which again weren’t for appearance but to prevent infections from developing.

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​Then I found out that a doctor named Ramirez [1] in Detroit had performed similar surgeries for our military. We went there, hoping he wouldn’t turn us away. He turned out to be a very kind and pleasant person, and indeed, he didn’t refuse to help us. The doctor even said he wouldn’t charge us for the surgery. However, there was one problem—we had to wait for an available ‘window,’ meaning an open operating room, a free anesthesiologist, and the entire medical team for this procedure. This waiting lasted for more than a year.

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In the meantime, we continued meeting with other doctors. I thought, perhaps I should look into bionic eyes—I had heard in the news that there were already some promising results. The goal was no longer to restore my vision immediately but to establish connections, so that if a bionic eye suitable for me were developed, I could fly back and regain my sight.

As soon as we arrived in the United States, I was immediately offered a guide dog, but I refused. I said, 'Why would I need a dog? I’m in America; they’ll surely restore my vision here.' Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

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However, they did insert a facial bone implant. Initially, it was planned to transplant a bone, but instead, they used a 3D implant—an exact replica of the bone that had been destroyed. In Ukraine, the first such surgery was performed several years later. At that time, it would have been impossible to do something like this in Ukraine. Of course, achieving full symmetry is impossible, as the muscles are damaged, and the scars prevent it. But everything that could be done was done in the best possible way. I am very grateful to Dr. Ramirez—if he ever sees this interview, we send him our warmest regards.

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Right after the surgery, I was again offered a guide dog, and by then, I was ready to accept it. In Columbus, Ohio, I spent three weeks learning how to walk with a cane, and then transitioned to working with a dog. The surgery was tough, and it was challenging for me to train, but the professionalism and thoughtful support of the instructors really helped me.

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I try to share on my YouTube channel that support doesn’t mean doing something for a person with disabilities—it means helping them to work and live independently, not living their life for them. At the Pallet Dog school, this principle is at the core of their training. One of the requirements is to attend without companions, as the goal is to teach independence.

I still remember Steve and Roy, even though many years have passed. I learned a lot there.

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Then my sister, Hena, and I returned to Ukraine—Hena is my guide dog. In the early years, I received a lot of support—moral, physical, and financial. I was assured that I wouldn’t have any problems with routine issues: 'Reach out, and volunteers will help.'

But as time went on, people had their own challenges, especially now during the war. Many people are on the front lines, there are many newly injured individuals, and countless new challenges. The support gradually diminished—less and less over time. Now, it happens that I haven’t received any assistance for years, except for a few small exceptions.

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It’s difficult because my leg hasn’t grown back, and my sight hasn’t returned. Yes, I’ve learned a lot, I have a profession, a job, and I earn a living, but it’s still hard to accept. Perhaps this attitude toward me now is because I show everyone how much I can do. Just kidding… In short, I try not to give up.

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On that same YouTube channel, there’s so much work involved—so much to think through, so much anxiety about whether it will succeed or not. And so far, there’s been no return. I’ve started wondering whether I should keep going or not, because I still have to pay for utilities, and they’re getting more expensive. So I need to earn a living, not just help others.

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Of course, I’m all for helping and supporting others. In one of my videos, I talked about how one of the hormones of happiness is oxytocin, which is released either when we help someone or when someone helps us. Helping others is a good feeling.

But sometimes people watch the YouTube channel, call me, and say, ‘There’s a wounded soldier or someone in depression who needs help. You don’t have to do much—just talk to them. What’s the big deal, is it hard for you to talk?’ Unfortunately, for many, being a psychologist isn’t considered a real job.

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I’ve had many professions, and I have hobbies too—like farming. I also do massages, although people tend to think the same way about that: ‘What kind of work is massaging? Just stroking someone, right?’ But massage is actually very hard work.

And yet conducting psychological therapy, delving into someone’s problems, and truly listening to them is much harder. Sometimes the flow of negativity—it’s there in everyone, believe me, everyone—especially soldiers, especially those wounded during the war, is so exhausting.

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Honestly, I’m burned out—I admit it, I’m burned out.

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In the United States, I met Olga Zaporozhets [2], the founder of the Open Doors center. She offered me the opportunity to study, but at that time, I still had many plastic surgeries ahead of me. By the way, greetings to Mr. Oleh Antonyshyn [3] from Canada, who operated on me in Odesa and Lviv.

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At that time, the training was on-site and very expensive, so I had to decline. Besides the surgeries, I also needed to sort out my everyday life. There were many unresolved issues related to payments and pensions, and none of it had been formalized yet. Even now, I still face issues with documentation. That really wore me down—I didn’t expect such treatment from the state.

I went as a volunteer to defend the country, sustained these injuries, and now I have to go to court just to get a pension. I’m embarrassed even to mention the amount—it’s just enough to pay for utilities, but as for living expenses, I have to figure that out myself and earn a living.

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You might say, ‘But aren’t utility services completely free for people with disabilities like you?’ Yes, but only for 70 square meters. I’m entitled to 70 square meters of housing from the state, and even then, it’s often some old Soviet-style apartment—if I didn’t already own a home myself. But if I earned my own housing, those 70 square meters aren’t provided.

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I’m also entitled to a car, and right now I’m looking for where to buy one. If I do buy it, the state won’t provide anything. It’s like they refuse to give you what you’ve earned. These old Soviet principles, established during Stalin’s time, are still in place: if you’re entitled to something, just wait—maybe you’ll get it someday.

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Since 2014, no one in the Khmelnytskyi region has received a car. Before 2014, people with disabilities were provided with vehicles, but after that, it all came to a halt.

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Back in 2016, I started thinking about what I should do, and the examples of people who had lost their sight inspired me greatly. At a hospital in Kyiv, I attended courses on using gadgets and computers, which were taught by visually impaired individuals. If they can do it, so can I!

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I have friends and acquaintances—lawyers, psychologists, actors, singers—who travel and live full lives. I want to live like that too. That’s when I began pursuing my pension and insurance payments.

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With the insurance payment, I was deceived: in 2018, the amount was supposed to be 800,000 UAH, but I only received 300,000 because my injury occurred in 2016. However, my pension was only calculated starting from 2018, as I hadn’t filed a claim in 2016. From 2016 to 2018, I received no payments at all.

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And for everything, you have to go to court. I still haven’t finished all the legal proceedings—I just don’t have the energy or motivation to deal with it all.

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When we found out that military personnel were eligible for education funding, I already had a year of experience as a military psychologist (I served in a reconnaissance group but held the position of a military psychologist). I wanted to deepen my knowledge and combine it with massage therapy.

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While waiting for surgery, I interacted with local Ukrainians who took me to various massage masterclasses. For example, we would attend a session on Thai massage, and afterward, I was shown how it was done. I remember in Chicago, Mrs. Natalia took me to a myofascial massage class—there’s even a video on Facebook—and I was also taught how to perform reflexology foot massages.

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Even back in 2016-2017, I was already studying audiobooks on psychology under the guidance of Mrs. Olga Zaporozhets and learning how to perform massages. Upon returning home, we enrolled at the "Ukraine" Institute to study for a master's degree in Social Work and Practical Psychology. My wife and I completed the program together, and we really enjoyed it. The institute has an inclusive department specifically designed for people with physical disabilities, where they truly understand people like me.

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At first, my wife didn’t want to study with me, saying, 'I’ll just travel with you.' At the time, we didn’t have our daughter yet, and I insisted she attend lectures with me and also earn a degree. Initially, they promised that both of us would study for free, but in the end, only my education was covered, and we had to pay for Olesya’s tuition ourselves.

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Just before the full-scale invasion, Mrs. Oksana Syvak, one of the co-founders of 'Open Doors,' invited me to enroll in a remote training program via Zoom, which was funded by NATO. At that time, my father had just passed away, and our daughter was born—it was a difficult period for us, but we agreed, even though the training was expensive and the requirements were very demanding.

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The program required 260 hours of direct client contact and around 300 hours of indirect contact. We had just started the training when the full-scale war began. However, we decided to continue, and it helped keep us going. Imagine: twelve people living in one house, a small child, dogs…

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But, thank God, we managed, completed the course successfully, and 'Open Doors' offered me the opportunity to train further as a supervisor. At the same time, we were studying at the Institute of Somnotherapy to become sleep therapists—psychologists specializing in sleep disorders.

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Perhaps it was the wrong decision; I overestimated my strength. Work in the mornings, training in the afternoons, more training in the evenings, and studying on weekends—I had virtually no rest or personal life. And the war didn’t stop—bombings, air raid sirens… It was hard, and it’s still hard to this day.

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When I was still in the United States, volunteers helped me apply for housing. I kept calling acquaintances, asking how things were progressing. Then I found out that my documents had been lost. I asked my father to collect them again, wrote a power of attorney… I was nervous and frustrated—how could they lose my documents?

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But thanks to this situation, I ended up being one of the first people to receive not the housing assigned by state officials, but funds, which allowed me to choose where and what to buy—not based on my registered address, but anywhere in Ukraine. The only requirement was that the property had to have a bathroom, a toilet, a kitchen, and at least 70 square meters for the family. More was allowed, but less was not.

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The house came without furniture but with repairs, and the land plot was neglected. Bit by bit, we started putting things in order. I also participated. I would sit on a stool with a small axe, chopping and clearing brush, digging, and planting. I asked relatives and friends for help.

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I started replanting my grapevines, which I had a whole collection of. I roughly drew up a plan for the garden plot, and they guided me to the designated spot. I used a small spade to dig holes, and others helped me plant. We worked the land—sometimes with a tractor, sometimes by hand. I tried digging myself, and, you know, it came out a bit uneven. Then I figured out how to place a board and walk along it. That worked better, but the ground was uneven, and the board would slide off the bumps.

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Eventually, I adapted a piece of rebar wire to keep myself aligned with the row. It brought me a great deal of satisfaction.

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In our garden, we had both fruit-bearing and ornamental plants. However, when the full-scale war began and the question arose of whether there would be food available to buy, I started focusing more on fruit trees, bushes, and seedlings. Previously, I didn’t pay much attention to whether the plants in my flowerbed produced fruit. Now, I do.

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For example, honeysuckle. It has sweet and sour, healthy berries. It’s not very common here and is one of the first to bloom in spring with yellow elongated flowers. I’ve never actually seen it bloom, but I’ve been told about it, and I’ve created a mental picture in my head.

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Another unusual bush is goumi, from the oleaster family, like sea buckthorn. But while sea buckthorn has small sour berries, goumi berries taste like a cross between cherries and pineapples. Its flowers resemble tiny bells. Talking about this really lifts my spirits. Even now, as I’m telling you, my mood improves.

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My parents are from Dunayivtsi, a small urban-type settlement. My father passed away, and my mother moved to Khmelnytskyi, where she lives near us. I was born in 1985, during the Soviet Union, but my conscious life and schooling took place in independent Ukraine.

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My parents lived well, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they lost their jobs and had to turn to farming to survive. As a result, I spent my childhood in the fields, herding cattle with a backpack full of books. This taught me to work hard and instilled a lifelong love for the land, which has stayed with me ever since.

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I have never been to Crimea, but I am convinced that Crimea is Ukraine. It always has been and always will be! When the 'little green men' entered Crimea, I was shocked that it was surrendered without a fight. There are protocols, and if someone trespasses on our territory, the first shot should be fired into the air, and the next—to stop the threat. Instead, they marched in columns with the Ukrainian flag like children.

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At the time, I called military enlistment offices because I had studied at the Kamianets-Podilskyi Military Engineering Institute. And once again, my documents were lost...

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I went to war because someone invaded my country, my homeland. Yes, things here are far from perfect, but it’s mine, and I couldn’t sit idly by while the enemy tried to erase it from the face of the Earth.

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Many people now say, ‘Why fight, when the government isn’t right?’ To that, I say, ‘Take responsibility for yourself! For your country and who you are.’

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I lost my sight and a leg, but even if I had known this in advance, I would have still gone. Doing nothing is even more unbearable.

Now, with the full-scale war, it’s hard to stay here, although I won’t say there’s no fear. When I think about the guys on the front lines, especially when I talk to them, there’s fear—but sitting at home while my comrades are there is incredibly difficult.

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That’s what motivated me—not because my parents had nationalist roots or anything like that.

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I still remember my great-grandmother on my mother’s side, who lived to be 106 years old from the day of her baptism. She clearly remembered the day because at that time she was already a little girl, sitting on a stool, and the priest scolded her for swinging her legs—that memory stuck with her. So, in reality, she lived to around 110, give or take.

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Her husband was executed in the 1930s for no reason at all. There was an order in the village to identify a certain number of so-called 'enemies of the people.' He was a very calm, kind, and non-confrontational person, but they took him along with others to Kamianets-Podilskyi. She used to send him food parcels. What could she send? She said they cooked beans and dried them—that’s all they could give. Then one day, they refused to take the parcel and told her he had been executed.

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Later, she was taken to prison as the wife of an 'enemy of the people.'

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My grandmother and her two brothers—she was about five or six years old at the time, and her brothers were three years older—were left alone in the house. The house didn’t have a stove but a traditional Ukrainian oven, called a 'piets,' which had to be lit from the inside, with pots and pans placed directly into it. That little girl would climb inside the oven to light it. Imagine how uncomfortable and dangerous that was.

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When my great-grandmother returned from prison, the four of them lived together and later worked on a collective farm.

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They told stories about the famine. Here in the Khmelnytskyi region, it wasn’t as devastating. Food was confiscated, but not as many people died as in eastern or central Ukraine. My grandmother said they lived near a pond and hid food in the reeds, ate weeds in the spring, and caught crows and sparrows. That’s how they survived.

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They also endured the famine of 1946, but at that time, people didn’t complain as much because it was clear—the war had just ended.

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On my father’s side, they were also collective farmers. They told me that during World War II, my mother’s father, still a teenager, was taken to Germany. He was the youngest among the workers, and one of the guards secretly gave him food, which saved his life. They talked about the hard years on the collective farm, how they worked, and how agriculture was rebuilt.

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I was born a Ukrainian, I was born in Ukraine, and I was born at a time when certain borders were peacefully established in the country. We didn’t steal anything. The Soviet Union collapsed, and the borders of its former republics were defined—so please, respect them!

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And then that so-called 'pseudo-historian' starts making claims. If that’s the case, we’ll go back even further in history, to the time of Kyivan Rus, when Muscovy didn’t even exist, and declare that all of Russia is ours…

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So many Soviet-era officials are still around. And it’s not about age. You see young people who carry that 'Soviet mindset,' and then there are older individuals who are very modern. I know about corruption not from television. For example, war veterans are entitled to many things, but just try to claim them. It took me four years to get a prosthetic. It’s practically a tradition: before the full-scale invasion, I gathered all the documents to submit to the prosthetic factory—and they lost them. I can’t collect them myself; someone has to help.

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Every two years, I have to prove that I’m missing a leg and my eyes. I need to go through an individual rehabilitation program—first, book an appointment with a family doctor, then visit all the specialists at the clinic, then the Medical and Social Expert Commission (MSEC), get a document from MSEC, and memorize the entire list of entitlements. You can’t rely on the person reviewing your documents to know what you’re entitled to.

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I say, ‘I’m entitled to footwear.’—‘What kind of footwear?’—‘Custom-made, because I have no leg, and the other one is damaged.’ If someone only has one leg missing, they don’t get footwear, but if the other leg is also damaged, then you qualify. Then you take that paper from MSEC to social services, where they look at everything and send you back home because they need the original documents.

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For eight years, I’ve been bringing them those originals! Don’t they already have them on file?

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You bring the originals, and they give you a referral from social services to the Disability Fund. And then the Disability Fund looks at it and says, ‘This code isn’t correct,’ and everything starts over. You go back to MSEC, and they yell, ‘Why are you here? We’ve already done everything!’—‘Please, I need you to correct the code.’—‘But it’s written here.’—‘No, it needs to be written here.’

How am I, a blind person, supposed to explain and show them? I ask acquaintances, friends, and journalists—I raise everyone I can.

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There was a time when I gave up and said, ‘When the war ends, I’ll take this prosthetic issue to Maidan!’ Now, I categorically won’t do that because I know pro-Russian forces will jump on it and use it in the information war. But when it’s all over, I won’t beg for a prosthetic or anything else from the state through this humiliation and begging.

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Yes, we’ll have to fight not only against Russia externally but also against this damned Soviet mindset within Ukraine. Sometimes you talk to officials, and they seem like reasonable people… I was talking to a member of the Verkhovna Rada: 'Listen, have some decency, change that regulation. How long do we have to discuss this? Do you know that war veterans are still entitled to the “benefit” of having priority access to landline phones and wired radios?' And he says, 'You see, we can’t take benefits away; we can only add new ones.'—'You don’t have to take it away. Replace it with wired internet, but get rid of that embarrassment!'

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But some things are changing a little. For example, I received funds for housing, and the pension, while not much, is enough to survive. Living, however, is another matter… At least it’s enough for utilities. But if you have a family—a wife, a child—you can’t survive on just a pension. You have to work somewhere.

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I met Olesya in the States. My sister was with me at the time. A mutual acquaintance, who also has disabilities and has even more severe injuries than I do, called her to dial my number. He was a tremendous support to me, a true example of resilience! Olesya first called my sister, but Tanya was busy with something, so we ended up talking. Honestly, I don’t want to say too much about it—I don’t want to jinx it…

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When the first shelling began, my wife panicked: 'Let’s flee!' I told her, 'Take the child, take our mothers, and leave. I’ll support you as much as I can, and I’ll ask for help abroad, but I won’t go.' It was hard for me in the States, even though they helped a lot. I just felt like a stranger there…

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[1] Oscar Ramirez (USA) - a plastic surgeon ranked among the top 3 best plastic surgeons in the world. He is the author of techniques for endoscopic and minimally invasive facial rejuvenation. For his contributions to 21st-century science in the field of plastic and aesthetic surgery, he was included in the list of 200 leading and outstanding scientists by the International Biographical Centre (Cambridge, England).

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[2] Olga Zaporozhets is the CEO of the "Open Doors" Center, which is a structural unit of the International Institute of Postgraduate Education. She holds a Ph.D. in Counselor Education and Supervision, is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, and specializes in trauma therapy and chemical dependency. She is also an Associate Professor at Regent University (USA).

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[3] Oleh Antonyshyn is the Head of the Craniofacial Injury Program at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto and a Professor of Plastic Surgery at the University of Toronto.

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