Serhii Dovbysh was defending his home in Chernihiv when something inside him snapped. The Russians were a few kilometres away. Enemy planes bombed the city. Shells landed among its gold-domed cathedrals. And young soldiers under his command were dying in battle. Dovbysh, a major in Ukraine’s armed forces and a deputy commander, felt responsible.
“Everything broke in my head and soul. And my body. You are alive but you don’t feel alive,” he said. He estimated that about 10% of the men in his battalion were killed during fighting, and another third wounded. “You eat with people. For months you share a room with them. It’s like a big family. When they die you feel a wound in your heart.”
Russia’s full-scale invasion exacerbated his pre-existing mental health issues, he said, in a stressful period when there was scarcely time to eat or sleep. “I wanted to be brave and strong, to protect my country and town. But it was hard to cope. You knew the Russians might attack at any moment.”
Now discharged from the army, Dovbysh, who was suffering from depression, works with war veterans who are struggling to deal with physical and psychological trauma. Some suffer from anxiety. Others have lost limbs and are adjusting to a new life with prosthetics. “For these guys it’s a long process. They need to find a reason to carry on living. A few want to kill themselves,” he said, adding that he knew of cases of suicide from other units.
Ukrainian soldiers have been fighting since spring 2014, when Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and began a covert military takeover of the eastern Donbas region. Many volunteered since 2022 and there are now about 1 million current and ex-members of the armed forces. Dovbysh said the government was doing its best but the challenge of dealing with so many veterans was vast.
He said he managed his own mental health by taking up competitive sport and last year he took part in the Invictus Games. Other service personnel attend a three-week camp at a rehabilitation centre in Kyiv offering therapy with psychologists and doctors, as well as kickboxing, swimming, table tennis, gym sessions and massages.
Military therapist Mykhailo Parfonov said the veterans had a wide range of problems including physical damage caused by mines and concussion, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, nightmares and panic attacks. The goal was to rehabilitate soldiers so they could return to the frontline, he said. About 80% of those went through the course were fit for service.
He said that soldiers who came back from Russian captivity were in a bad state. “They are reserved. They have been beaten and starved. It’s not just physical wounds. The Russians humiliate them,” he explained, adding that veterans were often reluctant to seek psychological help. “They worry about being judged,” he said.
Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, last year launched a campaign to persuade Ukrainians to look after their mental wellbeing and the online information portal Ti Yak – how are you? “The battle with pain, past traumatic experience, is an invisible front where we also have to win,” she said, adding that more than 90% have at least one symptom of an anxiety disorder but only a few sought help.
Paul Niland, an Irish writer and businessman living in Kyiv, who in 2019 founded the suicide prevention and mental health support hotline Lifeline Ukraine said that since the invasion its caseload has quadrupled. Ukraine’s rate of suicide is decreasing but remains high and above EU levels – in 2020, 30.6 deaths per 100,000 people, against a global average of 10.4
The hotline initially offered help to veterans and their families and now serves everybody. Niland said many of those who got in touch by phone or SMS were acutely worried about loved ones being killed. They also struggled with “constant exposure” to images of destruction from cities such as Mariupol, or more recently Avdiivka, flattened by Russian bombs. Some callers had traumatic personal experience of living under Russian occupation, where rape of women and girls by invading troops was widespread.
“You see young women with blank expressions. When we talk to them they say that they don’t want to live any more because of what they have been subjected to,” he said. There was a stigma attached to mental health problems dating from Soviet times, he added, plus a shortage of trained psychologists. Numbers were significantly lower than in countries like Germany or the US.
For some, 2022’s all out attack triggered the return of painful memories. Vitaliy Paraskun, an evangelical pastor, is from the industrial city of Sverdlovsk in the Luhansk region, close to the Russian border. In 2015 Russian separatists accused him of having Ukrainian sympathies. They imprisoned him for six months in a freezing abandoned mine. “When I got out I had mentally fallen apart,” he said.
Paraskun moved to the Kyiv region and slowly rebuilt his life. In spring 2022 Russian troops occupied the village of Dymer, where he was living, on their way towards the Ukrainian capital. “There were attack helicopters in the sky. They were trying to seize Hostomel airport. The Russians shot at my daughter’s car. She was lucky to survive. The old trauma came back, worse than before,” he recalled.
The pastor escaped after three weeks and moved to the Kyiv suburb of Vyshhorod. He began preaching in a bomb shelter. His congregation grew after the invasion and included many who fled from occupied areas. “In times of trouble people pray, women especially,” he said. “God gives them comfort.” On a Sunday in December, 40 people joined his subterranean service. They said prayers for dead Ukrainian soldiers.
The war has also exacerbated tensions within families and between couples. Currently 4 million Ukrainians, most of them women and children, live abroad. About 6 million are internally displaced. “A lot of families are separated. Men who can’t leave the country worry their wives won’t return. Relationships end in divorce. There is loneliness,” Niland said. Children struggled with fathers who returned from the front changed by their experiences, he added.
Aina Vilberh, a singer-songwriter, said relations with her pro-Russian mother had got worse. “Things were already difficult. She lives in Crimea,” Vilberh said. Her own feelings of negativity had increased and she was drinking more. At the same time her income from music gigs had dried up. “I don’t see any future for Ukraine,” she said. Three of her female friends living in Europe were also unhappy. “It’s bad there and bad here,” she said.
The picture is mixed, with some veterans coping better than others. Dovbysh said he had found new purpose in helping ex-servicemen deal with the horrors of war. Earlier this year he took part in a conference on rehabilitation in Lviv, he said, and was in touch with military psychologists from Canada and Israel. “We’ve started work. By the time Ukraine achieves victory we will have found a solution for all of our vets,” he said.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
