The Ukrainian intelligence soldier doesn’t know how long his clinical death lasted after an explosive detonated beneath him.
All Andrii Rubliuk remembers is overwhelming cold, darkness and fear. When he regained consciousness in his shattered body — missing both arms and his left leg — excruciating pain engulfed him, and hallucinations clouded his mind.
“It’s an experience you wouldn’t wish on anyone,” the now 38-year-old says.
Two years later, Rubliuk is again dressed in military fatigues, his missing limbs replaced by prosthetics — hooks in place of fingers, one leg firmly planted on an artificial limb.
From the moment of the explosion, Rubliuk knew his life had changed forever. But one thing was certain — he vowed to return to the battlefield.
“Fighting with arms and legs is something anyone can do. Fighting without them — that’s a challenge,” he says. “But only those who take on challenges and fight through them are truly alive.”
Many Ukrainian brigades have at least one, and often several, amputee soldiers still on active duty — men who returned to combat out of a sense of duty amid the grim outlook for their country.
They are among Ukraine’s 380,000 war wounded, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Some 46,000 soldiers have been killed during the three-year war, and tens of thousands are missing and in captivity.
On the front line Russia is expending huge amounts of weaponry and human life to make small but steady territorial gains to the nearly one-fifth of Ukraine it controls. Meanwhile Ukraine, outnumbered and outgunned, faces challenges not only on the battlefield but also in diplomacy, as its once strongest ally — the U.S.— enters talks with Russia, raising fears that Ukraine and its European partners will be sidelined.
It is this dire situation that has driven wounded soldiers back to the front, where little has changed since they first left their civilian lives to defend their families from an invading neighbor.
For them, lying in a hospital bed was unbearable compared to standing alongside their brothers-in-arms to defend Ukraine. But they all agree on one thing — when the war ends, they won’t spend another day in uniform; joining the army was never their first choice.
Rubliuk rejoined the special forces last spring as a senior sergeant in the Artan intelligence unit, training new soldiers and monitoring enemy drones. His rehabilitation began in late 2022, but he believes it never truly ends.
“Every new day is part of my rehabilitation,” he says. His new body, he adds, is a balance between self-acceptance and continuous recovery.
A comrade who was with Rubliuk when the explosion happened and suffered minor injuries, remembers the moment vividly. “I thought he was dead,” said the soldier who did not give his name in compliance with special forces rules.
