In the early 1980s, military forces from the Soviet Union went to war in Afghanistan in an effort to prop up a failing Marxist regime. At the time, Ukraine was part of the union, and many of its people were conscripted. Plenty of soldiers ended up losing legs in the fighting – and back then, their options weren’t good.
Shockingly, the Soviet authorities’ response was to offer them a medical version of a skateboard to get around. This time, the conditions of modern warfare mean that unprecedented numbers of people are losing limbs, presenting the country with a huge challenge. The response, however, has been very different.
Kumka, who is a co-founder of Protez Hub, an initiative to improve the lot of Ukrainians with amputations, has been stepping up her work. And her organisation is just one part of a sprawling network of clinics, start-ups and research labs that has sprung up to help the injured. The AI expert who says artificial general intelligence is nonsense Thankfully, no skateboards are involved.
Does Ukraine really have what it needs to help the legions of injured people – many of whom will need prostheses for decades to come? Is this newly created industry always acting in the best interests of those it assists? And it is worth asking what the rest of the world can learn from Ukraine’s booming prosthetics industry.
Unsurprisingly, statistics on the number of Ukrainian amputations are murky. Figures of up to 100,000 are often mentioned in news reports, apparently based on government estimates. But Ukraine has an interest in exaggerating this number to bolster international empathy and support.
Kumka, who can access official statistics as part of her work, tells New Scientist the real number is around 24,100, counting from the beginning of 2021 to the end of 2025. (Neither the Ukrainian Ministry of Health nor the Ministry of Social Policy responded to requests to confirm this number.) However, even that lower estimate represents a tragic loss for a whole generation of Ukrainians. For context, 12,000 UK service members lost limbs in the six years of the second world war, while around 1705 US service members had limbs amputated as a result of injuries sustained during 16 years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. For Ukraine, which had one of the lowest incomes of any European country even before Russia’s invasion, the necessary medical response is an enormous challenge.
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