‘I lost my arm and ate dog food to survive’: The unprecedented loss of limbs in Ukraine
“Incoming!”
One word and then Gosha’s life changed forever.
The mortar exploded right next to the 30-year-old Ukrainian soldier.
If his friend, Vasian, hadn’t shouted, Gosha wouldn’t have turned. The mortar would have exploded in his face. Instead it was his arm.
“Blood was streaming like hell,” Gosha recalls.
Warped metal and broken cars in the ruins of Azovstal
It was early May last year. The two friends were at the heart of a battle that would come to define the ferocity of the Ukraine war.
“I reached for my tourniquet and gave it to him. ‘Higher, Vasian!” He tightened it. It didn’t tighten well … and then he said ‘f***, what shall I do?’ I passed out.
“When I regained consciousness, I said: ‘Vasian, finish me off, because I’m f****** done'”.
Vasian wouldn’t do it. He refused his friend’s pleas. Sixteen months on, at a small prosthetics clinic in the United States, Gosha tells a story of horror and survival which reflects a much wider challenge.
At least 25,000 Ukrainians have lost limbs since Vladimir Putin’s invasion last year.
Accurate figures are hard to verify and could be much higher.
The number of Russian soldiers to have been maimed is not known but is thought to be huge too.
Neither Ukrainian nor Russian officials are willing, officially, to reveal a figure which underlines the cost of the war.
Gosha is treated by clinician Michelle Intintoli
Read more:
In pictures: the pounding of Azovstal
The surgeon smuggled into Mariupol
Thousands of amputees
“The number is not official, and some of them are multiple limb loss,” Mike Corcoran, the clinic’s co-founder says of the Ukrainian estimate of 25,000.
“That’s a stadium full of amputees.”
In 18 months of war in Ukraine, there have been at least 10 times the number of Ukrainian amputees than Americans maimed over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
Gosha is the 39th Ukrainian soldier to come to the Medical Centre Orthotics and Prosthetics (MCOP) just outside Washington DC. We met him on the day he was first fitted with a prototype prosthetic arm. It is the start of several weeks of rehabilitation and therapy at the clinic.
Eventually, he will leave with a carbon fibre version of his missing limb.
Prosthetician Mike Corcoran speaks to Sky News
The clinicians at MCOP are experts in military prosthetics and have spent two decades at the world-renowned Walter Reed Medical Center treating American soldiers.
But Ukraine’s challenge is different. It is compounded by the intensity of the conflict and rudimentary amputations.
The battlefield first aid straps, called tourniquets, designed to be attached to the limb just above the wound to stem bleeding, are often fitted too high and left on for too long. The bleeding is stopped but the cells in the limb are killed in the process.
The consequence – a whole arm or leg will need to be removed rather than just part of it. And that process is carried out in the most horrific of conditions.
Inside the ruined steelworks. Pic: AP
‘The guys were rotting alive – it was like a horror movie’
Gosha was wounded in the battle for the Azovstal steelworks in the eastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
The two-month siege ended on 17 May, 2022 with the surrender of the last remaining Ukrainian soldiers. Gosha was among them and taken into Russian custody.
The battle was defining in its intensity and, ultimately, its futility.
Units from Ukraine’s Azov Battalion were cornered in one small part of the sprawling plant. The soldiers slept in an underground room which doubled as the battlefield clinic.
“People were lying together, one next to the other. They amputated arms and operated in the same room we were lying in,” Gosha recalls.
“They were cutting someone’s arm off. Everybody was watching it. On the floor there was a bag full of arms and legs.”
Gosha explains how the injured lay in a long narrow room lined with rows of bunk beds, three or four high.
“The guys were rotting alive, everyone was stinking, everyone had some infection,” Gosha says.
Life inside the Azovstal steelworks seen in Gosha’s photo
After his initial amputation in the bunker with a hack-saw, he said the wound “started to fester again” so his arm was amputated at a higher point.
Two weeks later, the steelworks was captured by the Russians. As a prisoner of war, Gosha spent more than a month without running water or painkillers.
He described how the ‘orcs’ – his slang for Russians – also took the Ukrainian soldiers’ supply of bandages.
He was finally released in a prisoner exchange. It marked the beginning of a long journey which has brought him, for a few weeks, to America.
Ukrainian soldiers on a bus after leaving the steelworks. Pic: AP
‘You can’t say no’
The MCOP clinic does not charge for its treatment of Ukrainian soldiers and prosthetics is an expensive business. One arm can cost $100,000 (£81,000) and a hook in place of a hand is an additional $8,000 (£6,500). A lot of Ukrainians ask for the hook because it’s more versatile.
“You can’t say no”, says Mike.
The fortunate fraction of Ukrainians who make it here to MCOP do so with the assistance of many charities including United Help Ukraine and Operation Renew Prosthetics in partnership with the Brother’s Brother Foundation.
The plan, eventually, is to open a clinic inside Ukraine. For now, Mike and his team are shuttling back and forth to Ukraine to train locals, deliver donated equipment and conduct in-country treatment.
Gosha tries his prosthetic
“It’s going to take more than our company and me. It’s going to take hundreds of prosthetists many years to actually take care of all these wounded people, not just military, civilians as well,” Mike says.
He predicts the challenges Ukraine faces with amputations will, eventually, make it the world leader in prosthetics. But it will take time and huge investment.
The growing list of people with lost limbs will, Mike said, “have to be addressed at some point”.
The limits of US aid
The US government has supplied billions of dollars of weaponry in tranches of ‘security assistance packages’ for Ukraine. But these packages do not allow for the funding of treatment or sharing of medical resources to treat injured Ukrainian soldiers.
In a statement, a spokesman for the US Department of Defence (DoD), Lt Colonel Garron J Garn, said: “DoD has not received any specific requests to enhance prosthetic care for wounded Ukrainian service members.
“However, there are several members of Ukrainian Armed Forces currently at Landstuhl (a US military medical facility in Germany) receiving treatment, outside of specific prosthetic care. We applaud the work of various charities who are involved in getting Ukrainians requiring prosthetic care.”
Cooking dog food to survive
Colonel Garn added that $14m (£11.3m) had been “obligated to support wounded service members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces for its budget in 2023”.
As Mike Corcoran and I talk, another Ukrainian arrives for his final appointment at the clinic.
Ilia Mykhalchuk is a double amputee and is ready for his final fitting of two state-of-the-art carbon fiber arms.
His story is horrific. One arm was blown off and the other peppered with shrapnel after an anti-tank rocket hit his vehicle in another defining battle of this war, in the city of Bakhmut.
The 36-year-old was then captured by Russia’s notorious Wagner Group of mercenary fighters.
“They knocked him out with whatever anaesthesia they had in the basement of a house,” Mike said.
“Basically it’s like a guillotine. They cut off both his arms and they didn’t even close them up, they just bandaged him. So it wasn’t clean; just the bone. The cut end of the bone is protruding and that makes for a harder fitting.”
The prosthetics are custom-made and can cost thousands of dollars
The scars left by the Wagner Group are both physical and mental.
“They made fun of him after they cut off both his arms. He saw torture, men being set on fire and having their fingers cut off. He’s got a lot of PTSD,” Mike said.
Watching Ilia, as the final fitting is completed, that internal trauma is clear.
Ilia Mykhalchuk with prosthetists Mike Corcoran and Jamie Vandersea
‘He never leaves my head’
Back in conversation with Gosha, more revelations which reflect the reality of this war and his ongoing trauma.
I asked about his friend Vasian – the comrade who had called out ‘incoming’ and had saved his life.
Gosha reveals that Vasian, and his pet dog, who was their companion in war were taken by the Russians and have not been seen since.
“Vasian never leaves my head,” Gosha said. “He is my sworn brother.”
Senior Sailor Spivak Vasyl (Vasian) with his dog Sofa
Gosha explained how he, Vasian and the dog, a Pit Bull Terrier called Sofa, would share dog food. It was all they could find in the sprawling steelworks. They would cook it. “It didn’t taste bad,” he says.
“We made beds for ourselves, and we put the dog between us, in the middle, and we slept like that, hugging. The dog could get some warmth. We were always together. And I promised him: “When we return back home, when I baptise my son, you will be the godfather.”
“My son is five now, he has not been baptised yet because I’m waiting for Vasian to return.”
Gosha wants to go back to the frontline. “I want to fight, if it’s possible, as a gun commander in the artillery.”
“Nobody wants to live in captivity. Russia will continue to terrorise, kill, capture, destroy. They won’t calm down until you beat the f****** hell out of them.”
With additional reporting by Eleanor Deeley, US Producer
A powerful earthquake struck off northern Japan, injuring 33 people and unleashing a tsunami.
The 7.5-magnitude quake struck at about 11.15pm local time, around 80 kilometers off the coast of Aomori prefecture.
Japan’s Fire and Disaster Management Agency said 33 people were injured, including one seriously, with most hurt by falling objects.
A road is congested with cars heading for higher ground in Tomakomai City December 8, 2025 after a magnitude 7.6 earthquake. Pics: AP
A tsunami of 70cm was measured just south of Aomori, in Kuji port, Iwate prefecture, while levels of up to 50cm struck elsewhere in the region, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.
“I’ve never experienced such a big shaking,” said Nobuo Yamada, who owns a convenience store in Hachinohe, Aomori, in an interview with public broadcaster NHK.
Earlier on, the meteorological agency issued an alert for potential tsunami surges of up to 3m/10ft, with 90,000 residents ordered to evacuate.
Residents were urged by chief cabinet secretary Minoru Kihara to go to higher ground or seek shelter until advisories were lifted.
People sheltering today in Kamaishi Elementary School in Kamaishi City, Miyagi Prefecture. Pic: AP
He said about 800 homes were without electricity, and that the Shinkansen bullet trains and some local lines were suspended in parts of the region.
Some 480 residents took shelter at the Hachinohe Air Base, defence minister Shinjiro Koizumi said, with 18 defence helicopters mobilised for damage assessments.
While Satoshi Kato, vice principal of a public high school in the same town, encountered traffic jams and car accidents en-route to the school as panicked people tried to flee.
Japan has recent experience of the perils of earthquakes – one in 2011 unleashed a tsunami that killed some 20,000 people and triggered a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
The earthquake warning off the coast of Aomori Prefecture, Japan. Pic: AP
Today’s quake caused about 450 litres of water to spill from a spent fuel cooling area at the Rokkasho fuel reprocessing plant in Aomori, the Nuclear Regulation Authority said.
But water levels remained within the normal range and there was no safety concern, the authority added.
Read more:
Tokyo overtaken as world’s biggest city
Japan sends in troops over deadly bear attacks
The Japanese government has now lifted all remaining tsunami advisories, but warned people to remain alert for another week in case of aftershocks.
Satoshi Harada, from the meteorological agency’s earthquake and volcano division, cautioned that the 2011 quake could repeat itself.
“You need to prepare, assuming that a disaster like that could happen again,” he said.
World
Ukraine war: The signs Putin is expecting more conflict, not less – and the frank conversation Keir Starmer needs to have
With more than a thousand troops being killed or wounded every day, there’s no sign that Donald Trump’s push to end Russia’s war in Ukraine is reducing the battles on the ground.
Quite the opposite.
Ukraine‘s military chief says Vladimir Putin is instead using the US president‘s focus on peace negotiations as “cover” while Russian soldiers attempt to seize more land.
That means much greater pressure on the Ukrainian frontline, even as Russian and American, or American and Ukrainian, or Ukrainian and European, leaders shake hands and smile for cameras before retreating behind closed doors in Moscow, Alaska, and London.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
This was not an upbeat meeting of Ukraine and its allies
Putin’s not counting on peace
The lack of any indicators that the Kremlin is looking to slow its military machine down also makes the risk of war spreading beyond Ukraine’s borders increasingly likely.
It takes a huge amount of effort, time, and money to put a country on a war footing as Putin has done, partially mobilising his population, allocating huge portions of government spending to the military and realigning Russia’s vast industrial base to produce weapons and ammunition.
Putin has been in India to shore up support from Narendra Modi. Pic: Reuters
But when the fighting stops, it requires almost as much focus and energy to switch a society back to a peace time rhythm.
Deliberately choosing not to dial defence down once the battles cease means a nation will continue to grow its armed forces and weapons stockpiles – a sure sign that it has no intention of being peaceful and is merely having a pause before going on the attack again.
The absence of any preparations by Moscow to slow the tempo of its military operations in Ukraine – where it has more than 710,000 troops deployed along a 780-mile frontline – is perhaps an indicator that Putin is anticipating more not less war.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
What is Putin trying to achieve in India?
How could the war end?
What happens next in Europe will depend on the content of any peace deal on Ukraine.
An all-out Russian defeat is all but impossible to conceive without a significant change of heart by the Trump White House and a massive increase in weapons and support.
The next best result for Ukraine would be a settlement that seeks to strike a fair balance between the warring sides and their conflicting objectives.
This could be done by pausing the fighting along the current line of contact before substantive peace talks then take place, with Ukraine’s sovereignty supported by solid security guarantees from Europe and the US.
But such a move would require Europe’s NATO allies, led by the UK, France and Germany, genuinely to switch their respective militaries and populations back to a wartime footing, with a credible readiness to go to war should Moscow attempt to test their support of Ukraine.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
Why Ukraine’s allies may welcome Trump walking away
Will Starmer level with the public?
That does not just mean increased spending on defence at a much faster rate – in the UK at least – than is currently planned. It is also about the mindset of a country and its willingness to take some pain.
France is already openly saying that parents may have to lose their children in a war with Russia, while Germany is requiring all 18-year-old men to undergo medical checks for possible national service.
No such tough but frank conversation is being attempted by Sir Keir Starmer with the British public.
The furthest his military chief has gone is to say “warfighting readiness” is his top priority.
But that is meaningless jargon for most of the public. Being ready for war is about so much more than what the professional armed forces can do.
Armies fight battles. Countries fight wars.
Read more:
UK unveils undersea tech
Navy chief offers chilling warning
Does Britain’s threat to Russia ring hollow?
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
New UK military technology unveiled
Worst case scenario?
The other alternative when it comes to Ukraine is a scenario that sees a sidelined Europe unable to influence the outcome of the negotiations and Kyiv forced to agree to terms that favour Moscow.
This would include the surrender of land in the Donbas that is still under Ukrainian control.
Such a deal – even if tolerated by Ukraine, which is unimaginable without serious unrest – would likely only mean a temporary halt in hostilities until Putin or whoever succeeds him decides to try again to take the rest of Ukraine, or maybe even test NATO’s borders by moving against the Baltic States.
With Trump’s new national security strategy making clear the US would only intervene to defend Europe if such a move is in America’s interests, it is no longer certain that the guarantees contained in NATO’s founding Article 5 principle – that an attack on one member state is an attack on all – can be relied upon.
To have a sense of how a war with Russia might play out without the US on NATO’s side, Sky News and Tortoise ran a wargame that simulates a Russian attack on the UK.
In the scenario, Washington does not come to Britain’s defences, which leaves the British side with very few options to respond short of a nuclear strike.
World
Israeli government accused of intimidation and harassment after raid on UN building in Jerusalem
The Israeli government has been accused of intimidation, harassment and a “blatant disregard” of its obligations by the United Nations after Israeli officials raided a UN building in Jerusalem.
Police officers, along with officials from the town council, entered the East Jerusalem compound of UNRWA, the UN agency that provides services to Palestinian refugees.
The compound has been empty since January, when the Israeli government ordered UNRWA to close the building, accusing the agency of being “infested” with members of Hamas.
The United Nations denied that accusation vehemently.
Read more: What were UNRWA workers in Gaza accused of?
Having gained entry to the compound, the officials filled vehicles with possessions, including office furniture, and raised an Israeli flag in place of the United Nations flag.
They claimed that the building had been raided because UNRWA owed around hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of local taxes.
However, under the UN charter, UN buildings are exempt from such taxes and are also considered “inviolable”, meaning that, rather than raiding the building, Israel has an obligation to protect it.
Since its staff were told to leave, there have been attempts to break into the compound, which has been secured by a team of guards employed by the UN.
Sky News has been told that, when the Israeli officials arrived on Monday morning, the security guards were detained in a room within the compound.
“We didn’t let them in when they first came to the compound, but they cut the chains and the locks and took control,” said George, the head of security, who was standing outside the front gate when we arrived.
“They told my guards to stay in one room, took their phones from them, and told them they couldn’t leave.”
‘The false accusations led to this’
UNRWA’s commissioner-general, Philippe Lazzarini, said the raid was “a blatant disregard of Israel’s obligation as a United Nations Member State to protect and respect the inviolability of UN premises”.
He said that failing to cooperate with UN agencies “represent a new challenge to international law, one that creates a dangerous precedent anywhere else the UN is present across the world”.
His anger was not isolated. Outside the gates of the UNRWA compound, we met Hakam Shahwam, who used to work here as UNRWA’s chief of staff. It was, he said, “a very sad day”.
Shahwam says the claims that UNRWA was a breeding ground for Hamas had led to the raid.
He told me: “The false accusations led to this. This is a shameful day, not only for the United Nations but also for the government of Israel.
“There must be a strong protest, and a response from the international community. This is unacceptable.”
Read more from Adam Parsons:
Gaza longs for normality, but quasi-anarchy reigns
Israeli forces kill two Palestinians after apparent surrender
‘It is time for UNRWA to be dismantled’
The Israeli government remains adamant that its criticism of UNRWA is justified.
When I asked Shosh Bedrosian, a spokesperson for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, about the raid, she said: “UNRWA is a stain on the United Nations.”
She added: “It is time for UNRWA to be dismantled. It is not part of the solution for Gaza, it is part of the problem.”
She did not comment on the legality of the raid, or on Israel’s ongoing commitment to the UN Charter.
-
Sports2 years agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports3 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Sports3 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment3 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment1 year agoHere are the best electric bikes you can buy at every price level in October 2024