"We were ready to die ..."
Two Ukranian soldiers flown to Sydney for treatment speak of a war that cost one his legs and both their innocence
SYDNEY: Friday 16 May 2025
Viktor had already unclipped one prosthesis by the time I ask if he suffers any trauma from the shelling that cost him both lower limbs. Later, he’ll have both off and a crutch disassembled. A blacksmith by trade, his hands are restless, but his eyes and voice are steady.
“We were ready to die,” he says, shooting a knowing look at his younger friend, Nazar (“Kapa”), whose injuries aren’t as apparent, but whose leg has been left 4cm shorter from a similar encounter on the Ukrainian front line. “What’s happened to us, it’s all relative.
“You see what’s happening around you. Each time you are aware that you might not survive. That happens time and time again, until you stop caring.”
He and Nazar – they are known in the military as “Blacksmith” and “Kapa”, their radio call signs, and are still enlisted soldiers despite their distance from the front lines – speak in shared sentences and from incomprehensible experience.
Later, they say that the soldiers celebrate when they are wounded because they think it’s good luck and makes them less likely to be killed. I don’t pretend to understand.
Viktor is not fluent in English and is speaking through a translator, but his eyes do a lot of the heavy lifting in a conversation. They hold you as he weighs out his words. There’s a physical and emotional calmness to him despite what has happened to him and his country in a war that’s grinding on at such terrible cost.
The 29-year-old man in front of me on this grey Sydney day appears to have kept self-pity at bay and is quick to crack a joke. “He is a very funny guy,” another Ukranian tells me. It’s testimony to him that his humour has survived over two years in the gruelling meatgrinder conflict. And the loss of both legs.
Viktor and Nazar sit in the window on a mezzanine level of a hotel that looks out over Circular Quay. Below them there’s a group of tourists, Carlton fans with a wagon train of pink roller luggage that they’ve laagered by the water’s edge, stranded and apparently unsure of their next move. Viktor’s Geelong cap – his unit at home is known as “The Cats” – sits between him and the 21-year-old Nazar ,who is taller, slighter and appears to be in his compatriot’s thrall. Both had never left Ukraine before they were injured on the frontlines, or flown in an airliner, and Viktor appears to have placed an older brother’s arm around the younger soldier who, like him, finds himself so far from home and the hell they’ve lived through since the 2022 Russian invasion.
We’d been tested earlier when Anton Lozbin, a Sydney-based Ukranian activist and our volunteer translator, left the three of us alone so he could get the two soldiers a coffee. They’d just returned from a rehab session at the Macquarie University Osseointegration unit. Viktor, seated on a bench, almost seemed to encourage examination of his recently fitted prosthetic limbs. At around $100,000 a set, they really are a rather impressive piece of engineering. I indicated as much with words and a gesture toward the machine-made foot that appeared to be a combination of snow ski, steel and spring.
“Yeah,” he shrugged. “But, nothing is as good as legs”.
He had legs right up until the moment an 80mm Russian artillery shell blew them to pieces on the first day of September 2024.
“We came under enemy fire and I gave the command to hit the ground and disperse, and on the sixth round of fire, I was hit by a mortar,” he says when I ask about the incident.
That’s the short-hand version. The longer one, as you can imagine, is harrowing.
Viktor was with the Special Reconnaissance Unit of the 130th Battalion and had been on the front line among some of the most ferocious fighting of the conflict for 18 months when his unit came under heavy mortar fire near the city of Chasiv Yar, Donetsk, on Ukraine’s eastern front.
He directed his men to leave their vehicles and to hide on the forest floor as waves of shells struck around them. When things went quiet, the soldier known as “Blacksmith” climbed onto the crest of a ridge above his compatriots to see if they could continue on, but the Russians took one more shot. The shell exploded at his feet. He remained conscious as he was bundled into the back of a pick-up truck and evacuated. He remembers thinking it unusual that he fitted sideways into the tray of the vehicle as it sped him away for treatment.
His legs, he said, looked “like spaghetti”.
When he arrived at the hospital in Dnipro, surgeons made the decision to amputate both legs above the knee.
Nazar, who somehow retains an adolescent air, was hit on Armistice Day by a Russian drone attack, south of Bakhmut, in Donetsk Oblast – not far from where Viktor and his men had their fateful encounter. He was evacuated and underwent 10 surgeries in Ukraine. “They saved my life, but they didn’t completely help, and as a result, my left leg was 4cm shorter than the other,” he explains.
Future Ukraine, a part of the broader Australian Federation of Ukrainian Organisations, organised for him to be flown to Sydney early this year. Specialist surgeons were able to grow extra bone and rebuild his leg in yet another operation – this one took 10 hours.
A spider web of angry red scarring peers out in the space revealed between the top of his socks and the lower part of his jeans.
Having heard the harbinger sound of a drone in that background in too many videos of people awaiting death in a Gazan refugee camp or a Ukrainian ditch, I offer that it must be an unimaginably terrifying thing to hear in your vicinity.
When it’s translated to them they share a few words and a chuckle.
“They both said, that’s because you haven’t heard what a tank sounds like,” Anton relays.
“With a drone, you can hear it and you can kind of see it,” Nazar explains. “With a tank, you only understand it after it has already hit.”
It is one of the few topics they both lean into, insisting I learn more.
Nazar makes a whistling sound and traces the arc of a missile with his left hand as they speak among themselves in Ukrainian.
“Any mortar or artillery, you can hear it when it is fired, when it is flying and when it hits,” Viktor continues. “A tank, you hear the explosion next to you, and then you hear when it was fired. Or you don’t hear it because you are already dead. It is faster than the speed of sound.”
I’d first seen the pair at a Ukrainian fundraiser featuring John McMurtrie’s Bluesberries (the Et Al house band) a few weeks ago in Sydney. Viktor and Nazar were interviewed on stage via another interpreter, Ukrainian community leader, Kateryna Argyrou. As we’d walked into the Paddo RSL hall, focus had been drawn to the two men on crutches. Argyrou explained from the stage that Viktor’s first trip in an aeroplane had been the one to Sydney to begin the osseointegration technique that would enable him to walk again.
Anton explains before they arrive at our meeting in Circular Quay that the young soldier’s wounds were left open. He was taken from Sydney airport straight to the hospital, where they changed the bloodied bandages on his stumps. Later, they amputated a little more of one leg to ensure they were the same length.
Restless and inquiring, on both visits, he has thrown himself into events with the Ukrainian community to raise funds for the war effort. And tried body surfing for the first time.
When he returned to have the osteointegration procedure this year, his determination astounded the specialists, who said they had never seen anyone stand on the artificial limbs a day after the surgery.
Before encountering the pair, Ukraine had been an ooze of horror piped in at night on the BBC World Service, or confined to the blowfly buzz of drones on social media videos.
But these two had lived it. Are living it. They’d been in those ditches on desolate front lines. The homes of their families and friends are still under threat from the invasion.
Nazar was a teenager when Russia invaded. He was 18 and already studying in a local military academy at the time. The courses were cut off, and they were told that because they were underage, they would not be forced to sign up, but they could fight if they wanted to. Most did, but some did not. Nazar’s father is a brigade commander who has been “defending Ukraine since 2014” – the year of Russia’s invasion and annexation of the Crimean region.
Viktor was working as a master blacksmith and had his own workshop when the invasion happened. He lived with his girlfriend at the time. Nazar offers that he was too young for such. Viktor rang many of his friends offering to fight with them, but was rejected by a number of units. He refused to undergo any initial training because, he says, he didn’t want to waste time learning to march or doing any of that “unnecessary stuff”. He wanted to fight for his country. A few months later, he was accepted into the 241st Brigade.
He recalls arriving at high ground in the Donetsk region and “everywhere we looked in a 360-degree view, there was burning. Every single second, something was exploding.”
“I had to defend what was mine, what I loved,” he explains. “At the very minimum, it’s a sense of pride to do that. I went to the fight because the alternative was that I would never be able to call anything in the country my own if I didn’t defend it when I was called to.”
He was given a machine gun and assigned to do reconnaissance on a front line that stretched the length of the country. Nazar became a drone operator.
Feeling the vast breadth and thick weave of my own timidity, I ask them about courage and fear. Viktor, as is the pattern, begins their response.
“Everyone has fear,” he says. “There are different types of fear, even when you go to defend your country, you feel the fear, but it is very important to forget this fear about yourself and instead use it as a motivation.
“Fear is important, fear saves lives, but it is important to use it as a tool to keep level-headed and clear-minded. If you are not in control of your fear, and I have seen people killed because of it many times.”
At some point, we discuss the Sydney Harbour Bridge. I tell them how Melbourne publisher Peter Isaacson, a flight lieutenant in Bomber Command during WWII, had been instructed to fly Q-for-Queenie home and use the Lancaster to raise funds for the war. Frustrated at being dragged away from the action, on 22 October 1943, Isaacson flew Q-for-Queenie under the Sydney Harbour Bridge. How he flew the plane under the bridge because it was so dull being out here after dodging death above Germany.
They’re both keen to be photographed down at the Quay, and I ask them what it is like to leave a war and find yourself among the tourists and citizens of the harbour city.
“It is good,” Viktor says. “It reminds us of the life we once had and the life we want to return to.” The truth is, they add with some regret, they cannot contribute as they once did. Still, they are keen to go back and do what they can.
The following day I hear they have gone on a day trip to Kosciuszko National Park with the Ukrainian ambassador and climbed to the summit with Ukrainian Ambassador Vasyl Myroshnychenko.
Viktor and Nazar’s treatment is estimated to have cost $300,000 and local Ukrainians have organised fundraising pages for both. Here is the link to Viktor’s “Help a Warrior to Walk Once More” page. And here is the link to Nazar’s.
Again the et al trumps the cricket. What horror. Keep up the great work.
You should send this article to Putin and see if he has any humanity