By Elena Alexeeva | 2025-12-19

Across Ukraine, soldiers who survive devastating battlefield injuries are doing what few outsiders expect: After months of surgeries, prosthetics and rehabilitation, they are rejoining their units. In a war defined by attrition and shortages, experience has become so valuable that even amputees are heading back toward the front, driven not by a taste for combat but by a conviction that leaving would mean surrendering their families' future.

Numbers and realities

Wartime governments rarely release casualty data, citing morale and security concerns. But in February, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said about 45,100 Ukrainian service members have died since Russia's full-scale invasion and about 390,000 have been injured.

A few weeks prior, Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram that there had been roughly 370,000 instances of medical assistance to wounded service members, allowing about half of them to return to duty. He thanked "everyone who helps advance military medicine and saves and rehabilitates our wounded."

Elena Tolkacheva, head of the Angels nursing service, which provides treatment, rehabilitation, prosthetics and social support to wounded soldiers and their families, said in an August interview with 24 Kanal that about 85% of wounded fighters return to service, including those with prosthetics. She added that as many as 25% of amputee fighters eventually go back.

If 2022 was "a year of amputations," as Andriy Palamarchuk, head physician at the Kyiv Institute of Rehabilitation, described it to Parlament.UA in March, the fourth year of the invasion reflects a shift. Many Ukrainian brigades now include one or several amputee soldiers, according to a February Associated Press report.

After severe amputations, recovery can take many months or more than a year. Soldiers are entitled to rear positions, benefits and civilian reintegration. Still, many, particularly younger fighters, ask to return to combat units in any capacity.

Tolkacheva said she has worked with soldiers who were "wounded five times" and went back again. "This fighting spirit cannot be broken!" she said.

Voices from recovery

Some of the strongest motivation emerges far from Ukraine.

Oksana Dlaboha, assistant editor at The Ukrainian Quarterly, translated for and supported wounded Ukrainian soldiers undergoing rehabilitation in the United States. She told Kontur that several planned to return to the front despite life-altering injuries.

One of them, Vasily, spoke angrily about men who evade service.

"I don't consider them men. We lost our legs and arms there, but they're hiding?" he said. "If we don't hold the front, every populated area will have its own Bucha. The enemy will come and rape our women and kill our children." He said he intended to return to Ukraine and rejoin the fight.

The AP report also highlighted individual stories, including that of Andrii Rubliuk, 38, a senior sergeant with the Main Intelligence Directorate's Artan unit. Before the war, he was a farmer. After Russia annexed Crimea and fighting erupted in eastern Ukraine in 2015, he joined the army and trained as a reconnaissance engineer.

In November 2022, during a mission in the Kherson region, an explosive detonated beneath him. Rubliuk said he remembers only darkness and intense cold before losing consciousness. When he awoke, both arms and one leg were gone. He understood his life had permanently changed, but he decided he would return.

After months of hospital treatment and rehabilitation in Philadelphia and Florida, Rubliuk is back in uniform. He now uses hook prosthetics instead of hands and walks on an artificial leg.

"Fighting with arms and legs is something anyone can do. Fighting without them -- that's a challenge. But only those who take on challenges and fight through them are truly alive," he said.

Rubliuk now serves near the front, training other soldiers and sharing hard-earned experience.

Pressure of a long war

Doctors and medics say these recoveries are possible because Ukraine has rapidly built expertise in field surgery and trauma care.

From 2022 through 2025, Ukrainian medical teams, with international support, especially from the United States, developed treatment protocols that allowed thousands of severely wounded soldiers to return to service.

By late 2025, some cases were so complex "no one in Ukraine could handle" them, Tolkacheva said. Patients with major or multiple amputations are often sent to the United States, where advanced prosthetics specialists are available. Partner charities fund transfers and rehabilitation abroad, while the Angels service raises money for prosthetic components.

Psychological support is just as critical.

"When fighters know their home unit is committed to them, they'll be motivated to stay," Tolkacheva said, stressing the importance of comradeship. Advanced bionic limbs can also allow wounded veterans to serve in high-demand roles, including drone teams.

The broader context is grim, however.

Ukraine is lagging behind Russia in manpower and weapons, and Russian forces continue to slowly advance. Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi has acknowledged an acute personnel shortage last September. He said new recruits typically receive one month of basic training and two to four weeks of specialized instruction before being sent into combat.

Underprepared recruits struggle under fire and abandon positions. As the fourth year of the invasion nears its end, most Ukrainians who volunteered early have already served. Mobilization has grown harder, with draft evasion and illegal departures.

Against that backdrop, wounded veterans return not because they embrace war, but because they feel a moral obligation to prevent new atrocities like Bucha. They share one conviction: When the war ends, they will take off their uniforms for good. Soldiering, they say, was never meant to be their life -- only their duty.