A large number of soldiers return as amputees, and many suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Once home, they face stigma and a grueling course of rehabilitation.
Aleksandr, left, who lost his leg to a mine in Ukraine, had his prothesis adjusted by Yuri A. Pogorelov at Rus Sanitarium outside Moscow in November.

For Many Returning Russian Veterans, a Long Road of Recovery Awaits

A large number of soldiers return as amputees, and many suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Once home, they face stigma and a grueling course of rehabilitation.

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“There was a lot of pain at the beginning,” said Aleksandr, 38, referred to only by his first name in accordance with military protocol. But, he added, “eventually, your brain just rewires itself and you get used to it.”

Aleksandr spoke in an interview at a sanitarium in the Moscow suburbs while a doctor refitted his prosthetic leg. He is one of hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers returning home from a third year of war to government institutions and a society scrambling to provide for veterans at a time of sanctions, and to the parallel realities of the seemingly unaffected hustle and bustle of big cities and the hardships on the front.

The veterans have both visible and invisible needs that they bring back to their families, who experienced the trauma of waiting for them to come home alive and now must learn to care for them.

There are at least 300,000 severely injured veterans, according to calculations by the independent Russian media outlets Mediazona and Meduza, as well as the BBC, which all use open source statistics to calculate the war’s toll of deaths and injuries. Since 2023, the authorities have made it more difficult to estimate the number of severely injured because they have designated so many statistics as classified, journalists said.

A man sits in a rehabilitation bath at a sanitarium, while a health worker sprays his back with water.
Dima, a soldier from Kursk whose legs were paralyzed by a shrapnel in his back, received a hydro massage at Rus Sanitarium. Returning veterans have both visible and invisible needs that they bring back with them to their families.

Veterans swim in a pool at Rus Sanitarium.

Aleksandr said that after being sent to the outskirts of Kupiansk, in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, he had been commanded to dig trenches in an area where recruits had laid mines the day before. He doesn’t know whether the mine he stepped on was Ukrainian or Russian, but his right leg was amputated below the knee and he spent half a year being shuttled from hospital to hospital before he was fitted with an artificial limb.

Back at work as a welder in Russia, he now endures 12-hour shifts that require him to stand for the duration, even though amputees are advised not to wear their prostheses for more than a few hours at a time. Still, he is thankful to be alive and considers himself lucky.

Aleksandr’s prosthetist, Yuri A. Pogorelov, said that Rus Sanitarium, a health resort combining medical treatment and recreation where the former soldier was being treated, had made about 100 prosthetic limbs in the past year, relying on imported materials from Germany, as well as some homegrown technology. Only a handful of the prosthetics were for veterans of the war in Ukraine.

The sanitarium, built in Soviet days for the country’s political elite, offers a wide range of physical and psychological therapies. Demobilized veterans from all of Russia’s recent wars and their relatives can come for rest and treatment for two weeks per year. About 10 percent of patrons are Ukraine war veterans.