“You can have my arm, but not my country”

Dying would have been the easiest. He would have Ordinary close your eyes and let go. The pain, the cold, the thirst: everything would eventually come passed. His broken body would have eventually given up.

But Dmytro Finashyn (28) did not die. He didn’t want to give this victory away to the Russians who stood there and shot at him. In the cafeteria of the Pinchuk Art Center, an art museum in the heart of Kiev, he tells Blick about the day he lost part of his body – but not his self-confidence.

May 23 was a hot day. And a deadly one on the battlefields outside the small town Soledarwhich was then still under Ukrainian control. Finashyn and his comrades from the Ukrainian army got into the crossfire the Russians. Finashyn dragged a wounded friend across the field and ducked under the Russian volleys when he himself was hit in the right hand.

Wet pants? He would rather have died

“My index finger just hung down. I tried to cut it off, but it didn’t work.” Finashyn shows his right hand mutilated into a claw. He no longer has his left hand. They amputated his entire left arm in Bachmut. A second shot shredded it on the battlefield beyond Soledar – and would have Finashyn almost in nirvana sent.

“It hurts so much that you don’t understand what’s happening to you anymore,” says the sniper. “You just notice there’s something wrong with your left side.”

Severely wounded, he crawled through the battlefield. “I realized I was losing a lot of blood. I fainted several times. The hallucinations were torture.” Supposed saviors kept appearing to him. But when he crawled toward them through the cold mud, they vanished into thin air.

Finashyn sips of dirty water from the puddles and try to keep moving so he doesn’t freeze to death. When the guts spoke in his shattered body, he unbuckled his seatbelt and pulled down his pants, suffering severe pain. You do not stain the Ukrainian uniform, not as a patriot, at all costs.

Hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers – and the end is nowhere in sight

Lasted two days Finashyns Torture until a Ukrainian search team finally found him and brought him out of harm’s way. Give up? Never been an option. “You can have my arm, but not my country,” he told himself.

It is difficult to say how many people are injured or killed on the battlefields in Ukraine. Both Moscow and Kiev refuse to publish exact figures on war tactics.

US estimates put nearly 200,000 Russians killed or wounded in Ukraine. In the past week alone, more than 800 Russian soldiers are said to have died in the Bakhmut area alone. On the Ukrainian side, about 120,000 soldiers are probably killed or wounded. Very few believe that the death curve will soon flatten.

Even if Dmytro Finashyn has experienced the horror of war firsthand – he does not seem embittered. ‘That’s how it is now just now», says the young man and puts on his wide smile with teeth. The red beard is neatly trimmed, the uniform with the patched left sleeve fits perfectly.

With Boris Johnson in Washington DC

For his efforts, the sniper received the “Hero of Ukraine” award from President Volodymyr Zelenskiy (45). He recently traveled to Washington to accompany British ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson (58). DCto promote his homeland in the American capital.

“We have to do everything we can to get the win,” says phynasin. “We’ve already given way too much to just lay down our guns now.” He certainly didn’t want his wife and family to go through the same thing What currently happening to people in Eastern Ukraine.

The professional sniper also wishes the rest of Europe: “Remember what is happening in Ukraine right now,” says Finashyn. The Russians have no respect for life. “They just leave their wounded behind. If one of their tanks hits a mine and explodes, the other tanks drive Ordinary round and straight. I saw it myself.” Such people would stop at nothing. “We must stop them!”

Finashyns The will to fight is unbroken. “As soon as I get my special prosthesis in Poland in March, I want to reapply for the selection,” he says. Only his wife, a banker, is not enthusiastic about the idea. “I’m working on it,” says Dmytro Finashyn. “We all have to make sacrifices to win.”

Source: Blick