LVIV and SAMAR, Ukraine — During a CrossFit class, one man slowly, methodically, pulls weights down from a machine. He's in the class, but he isn't fully participating; he's not doing the same exercises as the others, or chatting with them during breaks. Andriy Khrystiuk, 52, only just arrived in Lviv, a big city in western Ukraine, a few days ago. He's a veteran, and trying to recover from wartime mental trauma.
Every night Khrystiuk says when he closes his eyes his dreams take him right back to the front lines. "I often wake up all sweaty because I wake up from combat. In my dreams I still participate," he says.
Khrystiuk was a sniper in northeastern Ukraine's Kupiansk area until he was injured in an attack in May 2024. His right ribs were broken and his right lung was punctured as armor-piercing bullets went in one side and out the other. Bits of the ceramic plate from his ballistic vest were lodged into his chest.
After a long and difficult recovery process, Khrystiuk tried to go home — alone. He is divorced and his son was killed in the war. "Nobody waits for me there. It's emptiness," he says.
Occasionally, despite the dangers, he would drive supplies back to Kupiansk, to the front lines, to feel useful. He felt closer to his comrades on the front than to anyone in the community. He was lonely, and struggling to reintegrate into civilian life.
Just over a year after his injury, Khrystiuk is staying at a facility with other recovering veterans in Lviv because, he says, his "roof was leaking" — a Ukrainian metaphor for being mentally unstable.
There are more than a million veterans in Ukraine, according to the Ministry of Veterans Affairs. Many have physical and mental trauma from participating in combat, and Ukrainians are gearing up to tackle the issue of how to support them.
Supporting veterans
Early this year, Khrystiuk received an invitation to join a program called the Lviv Habilitation Center.
Though the program is small, people from all over the country who have been traumatized in some way by the war are invited. It serves as a place, after rehab, that veterans can grow used to their new life, come to terms with their trauma and learn new ways to live with their disabilities both mentally and physically. And, as Khrystiuk describes it, "Emotionally in this place you can take load off your chest a bit."
The kitchen is modified to work for people with a range of disabilities including wheelchair users and those using canes. A full-size gym helps people with physical rehab. Regular mental health sessions, and a number of programs including language courses and city outings in Lviv, all aim to help people reintegrate into civilian life.
Serhiy Titarenko, a 40-year-old veteran himself, leads the program. When he was discharged from the military in 2018 after an injury left him with no feeling from the chest down. He says he remembers being left on the street outside the hospital in a wheelchair that he didn't know how to use. He wasn't given tools to learn how to build a new life in this condition.
A psychologist now, Titarenko says there is a concerning rise in veteran suicide, mental health issues and addictive behaviors like drug use and gambling.
The habilitation facility can only host 20 veterans at a time, each staying three weeks. But Titarenko is eager to teach veterans what he learned and set up more programs across the country.
It's not just veterans who need help adjusting to this new reality in Ukraine. When the habilitation program opened in the residential area where it's located, some area residents asked if the center could cover the gym's floor-to-ceiling windows, "because they don't want to see disabled people," Titarenko says. But he refused, and instead he invited community members in to tour the center and meet the veterans. And he takes the veterans for walks around Lviv to increase interaction and engagement with the community. "We invited these people, our neighbors — civilians, to our center ... for understanding how they want to talk to us veterans, how they must develop, how they must see," Titarenko says.
Despite Titarenko's efforts on a small scale, many Ukrainian veterans told NPR that they don't feel like civilians understand them and their experiences after returning from the battlefield, and they don't feel comfortable seeking out professional help.
Supporting communities
Yuliia Krat is the lead psychologist at East SOS, a Ukrainian NGO that is helping with veteran reintegration. She says she is trying to tackle this divide between the community and veterans with a new training program that she's rolling out in cities and towns in Dnipro region, in central Ukraine.
The training is directed at community leaders, social workers, civil servants and others who may have frequent interactions with veterans. It starts by explaining, "what you experience in war leaves its mark, changes a person and their values."
Krat is doing this in hopes that civilians understand that the return home of millions of veterans is not just a veteran problem, but it's an issue that Ukrainian society must face as a whole. "My idea is that we as a society need to become commonly responsible for this challenge that we have now. And we cannot just, like, close our eyes and ... leave this responsibility on somebody else," Krat says.
That's not the only reason a community-targeted approach can be helpful. Even from his place at the Lviv Habilitation Center, Khrystiuk still worries about veterans who haven't found the kind of support that he did. "A lot of people are afraid of places like this. They are afraid to move out somewhere," he says. "They choose the 'glass' [starting to drink]. Also there are places that don't have these recovery centers and veteran spaces."
Veteran Andriy Melnykov, 57, lives in Samar, a city in the Dnipro region. When he was discharged last year, he says, he was depressed and drinking alcohol every day. The first six months were especially difficult. "I was on the booze and sleep," he says. "I didn't know what to do with myself. Like I had no idea what to do next."
It was his daughter, Arina Melnykov, who snapped him out of it. She's 15 and says that time is too difficult to talk about. Now they're at a community center in Samar with a group of veterans that gets together to play table tennis every week, he's stopped drinking, and he and his daughter regularly go biking together as well.
The Melnykovs were lucky. Many families, much less a teenager, don't necessarily know how to handle a veteran struggling with returning home to civilian life.
To Krat this is part of the reason the community-focused approach is so vital. Veterans often struggle to ask for help, and rely on family and community members for support instead. "And this is why it makes it so difficult to work with them directly because they simply block, they refuse to work with you," Krat says. Even training 10 psychologists for every district, she says, wouldn't be productive because many veterans wouldn't go to them. "That's why we try to give this knowledge to everyone in their surroundings, in their environment, so they can get this help even without knowing it," says Krat.
Still, the Ukrainians initiating these programs around veterans aren't sure they can meet the amount of need. "I don't know if it's even possible to be ready for something like this," Krat says.
But she also won't say it's impossible, and plans to continue building her community training program and spread information about how to support veterans as far as she can.
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