Prostheses for the heroic fighter

He lost both legs when an enemy tank shell hit his dugout. Now - 5 months after his injury and amputation - the soldier has taken his first steps on his iron limbs. At the UNBROKEN Centre he received prosthetic limbs with electronic knees. 

The 41-year-old defender Ivan Holyk is from Truskavets. The news of the great war caught him abroad, where he was working as a construction worker. And the very next day after the full-scale invasion, Ivan was at home and standing in line at the military registration and enlistment office. But he was not immediately accepted into the Armed Forces. Only three months later, he was able to join the army and joined the ranks of the 80th separate airborne assault brigade of Galician.

Ivan served in Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk regions. Given the type of troops, he cannot disclose what tasks he performed at the front. He can only briefly tell us about one of his combat missions: ‘We threw grenades at the enemy like apples.’ 

The airborne fighter was seriously wounded this year in February. Ivan was waiting in a dugout for a massive enemy attack. Suddenly, a tank shell came and exploded nearby.

‘My legs were blown off at once - along with my boots,’ says the defender. With no feet and a pile of shrapnel in his legs, Ivan puts on a knee-high bandage. All the time before the evacuation, which was 9 hours, the defender remained conscious. He lost consciousness in an ambulance and came to in Dnipro. 

To save the life of the severely wounded soldier, whose kidneys had already begun to fail, doctors had to amputate his limbs at hip level. After a long treatment in Dnipro and Kyiv, Ivan was sent to Lviv for rehabilitation and prosthetics at the UNBROKEN Centre. 

The patient has been working with physical therapists for 4 months. At first, they prepared the defender for prosthetics, and now they are helping him to master walking on artificial limbs. Ivan's prostheses are equipped with electronic knee joints that allow him to reproduce natural movements as much as possible. 

The defender was fitted with such modern technological prostheses thanks to donations made by Ukrainians to the dobro.ua charity platform ‘Prostheses for the Unbroken’. 

We are grateful to each donor for their concern!  

Collecting for prostheses for defenders