Used as human shields, starved and under fire: The horrors people with disabilities face in Putin’s war
Almost completely paralysed, Oleg could do nothing but sit under the bombing in his own excrement, after his caregiver mother was killed in front of his eyes by a missile attack.
At some point during the three weeks he was stranded alone, Russian soldiers came into the building and stole the wheelchair the 65-year-old Ukrainian was sitting in. They told him they needed it for a wounded soldier, and left.
This was early spring 2022 on the eastern side of Mariupol, a strategic Ukrainian port city that was under one of the fiercest bombardments of Russia’s invasion. There was no electricity, water or phone connection. Temperatures had dropped to -10C.
Due to multiple strokes in the past, Oleg had lost the use of all his limbs bar his right arm, and needed around-the-clock care. His mother had been looking after him until she was killed in a Russian strike that swallowed half their apartment block and nearly burned Oleg alive. A neighbour rescued him from the fire and took him to the ground-floor entrance of an adjacent building. There, others risked being killed by shelling to intermittently bring him food.
“I don’t know how he managed to survive with the use of only one arm,” his only daughter Yanina, 25, tells The Independent, with incredulity in her voice. The technology worker was in Kyiv when Russia invaded and spent months desperately searching for her father in the south.
“After the soldiers took his wheelchair, he lay on a dirty mattress, half-naked, having to go to the toilet on himself for almost a month. He couldn’t escape, get to safety.”
After Russia took full control of the scorched city, Oleg was taken by Russian soldiers and their Ukrainian proxies to an institution in the occupied town of Makiivka in Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, an area made up of the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. There he described appalling treatment. Parts of his foot were amputated because of frostbite.
“There was barely anything human about them,” he told The Independent about the Makiivka authorities that also tried to force Russian documentation on him.
The only thing that kept him going was his daughter, who eventually located him and worked on his rescue.
“I thought about what a daughter I have, that she saved me,” he added.
Oleg is among tens of thousands of people with disabilities in Ukraine who found themselves trapped along the deadliest front line of one of Europe’s bloodiest wars in generations. Unable to seek shelter, evacuate, or look for food or water by themselves, disabled Ukrainians have been “disproportionately” impacted by Vladimir Putin’s invasion and are suffering the brunt of the horrors of the war, according to the United Nations.
It took Yanina five difficult months to successfully bring Oleg back to Ukrainian-controlled territory and be reunited again in the capital.
“The authorities in Makiivka were very aggressive when I tried to get him out. It was like bailing my dad out of a prison,” she adds.
But in August 2023, exactly a year after his rescue, he died suddenly. His family thinks those weeks in Mariupol and the treatment in Makiivka, took a deadly toll on his body.
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- Source of information and images “independent“
