Ukrainian soldiers blinded in battle will never see their newborns.
In the ten months that have passed since the birth of his daughter, Ruslan Kozachok has scarcely come away from her side.
In the hospital, he was the first person to hold baby Isabella before his wife did. As of late, he has acquired the ability to maintain her balance as she is practicing her first steps.
But he has never laid eyes on her.
Shrapnel from a Russian shell perforated the left side of Kozachok’s skull in Chasiv Yar, the tiny city in eastern Ukraine where he was fighting as a soldier. This caused Kozachok, who was 47 years old at the time, to lose his vision three months before Isabella was born.
His accident has deprived him of his profession, his interests, his routine, and most painfully, the opportunity to watch his daughter grow up. Kozachok was previously a tattoo artist who owned his own salon. However, his injury has deprived him of all of these things.
Shrapnel from a Russian shell perforated the left side of Kozachok’s skull in Chasiv Yar, the tiny city in eastern Ukraine where he was fighting as a soldier. This caused Kozachok, who was 47 years old at the time, to lose his vision three months before Isabella was born.
His accident has deprived him of his profession, his interests, his routine, and most painfully, the opportunity to watch his daughter grow up. Kozachok was previously a tattoo artist who owned his own salon. However, his injury has deprived him of all of these things.
On the front lines of Russia’s terrible battle, Ukrainian forces are being killed and wounded on a daily basis, leaving a generation of young people with scars and injuries. Within the first few days of the invasion in 2022, a great number of people, including Kozachok, voluntarily joined the troops.
On a regular basis, severe eye injuries occur. Anna Purtova, a politician who is lobbying for soldiers who have lost their vision, stated that there have been at least one thousand soldiers experiencing blindness over the course of the past two years. During her time as head of ophthalmology at a hospital in Kyiv that treats both military personnel and civilians, Tetiana Lytvynenko stated that her ward’s thirty beds are consistently occupied.
The treatment of many combat injuries has been improved because to developments in medical technology, including the development of improved prosthetic limbs. However, there is not much that can be done for people who lose eyesight in both eyes and must learn to navigate the world without sight of their own. The increasing number of blind people in Ukraine has not yet produced any adaptations. A significant number of streetlights do not emit a beep for pedestrians, and automobiles frequently park on city sidewalks, which creates potentially hazardous obstructions. Guide dogs are not very common.
A number of injured Ukrainians are coping with all of these difficulties while also having to deal with the issues of parental blindness.
Kozachok and his wife, Yulia, who works in a bank, had an aspiration of beginning a family for a period of nine years prior to the occurrence of his accident. At the time, she was six months pregnant when she paid a visit to her husband in the hospital and shared with him the information that his physicians had shared with her: his vision was permanently lost.
The injury to Kozachok’s head had the potential to be potentially lethal. Almost instantly, he lost one of his eyes, and he had to crawl to an evacuation point, where he stopped breathing and lost consciousness. Although he was able to survive, when he awoke in the hospital, he saw a haze that quickly turned into darkness.
