How Ukraine's wounded soldiers are relearning the art of intimacy

Thousands of young men return home with life-changing injuries

- Liz Cookman

Yehor Babenko, 26, was serving with the border force in Mykolaiv, southern Ukraine, when the explosion happened. It was just days after Russia had invaded and he remembers little about the moment itself: smoke, fire, chaos. He doesn’t know what weapons were used, only that he remained awake as his body burned.

Losing all of his fingers and with his face and body badly damaged, Babenko spent months in hospital, before being sent to Spain for more than two years for medical assistance and physiotherapy. His injuries are hard to hide — his face is scarred and he lost his ears, most of his nose and now breathes through a tracheostomy tube. “For veterans, life is divided into before and after the injury,” says Babenko, who is back in Ukraine and working as a counsellor to help other recovering servicemen.

His next challenge is to find love. Step by step, he says, he is becoming more self-assured and although he believes he is too young to get married, he would like to date. “I can’t say I was very popular with women before the injury, though,” he jokes.