Aleksandr had only two weeks of training in Russia before being sent to the front lines in Ukraine in the summer of 2023. About a month later, he became an amputee.
Learning to live without his right leg is taking much longer than two weeks.
“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.
