A sports prosthesis fitted for a defender

With shotted leg, he neutralised the enemy in close fight and only then lost consciousness. After being seriously wounded, the defender has been recovering for a year. Later, he continued his military duties using a prosthetic leg. And now the brave commander has returned to the NESZLAMNI Centre to pursue his dream of running again. The long-awaited sports prosthesis was fitted to him by the Centre's prosthetists with the support of the dobro.ua charity platform.

25-year-old Gennadiy Tamulevych is a native of Luhansk region. He decided to become a professional soldier after the outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine. Back in 2014, Russian troops occupied his native Pervomaisk. So after school, he entered the Odesa Military Academy.

Gennadiy met the full-scale war near Kyiv. But already as an officer and commander of a group, which we cannot name for security reasons. He defended the capital for the first few weeks. And when it held out, his unit was moved to the Kharkiv area. Then - to Zaporizhzhia, where the soldier was injured in April 2022.

On that day, a group of our fighters went to one of the settlements to make sure there were no occupants there. But when they got closer to the houses, they realised that they were already waiting for them. A firefight started. The battle was almost close. Hennadii saw his enemy at a distance of ten metres. He was aiming at him with an assault rifle. It took only a moment for the defender to feel the electric shock hitting his leg. But before he fainted, he gathered the rest of his strength, fired at the enemy and neutralised him.
After that, he regained consciousness in a Zaporizhzhia hospital. There, doctors fought to save the soldier's leg: two enemy bullets had simply shattered his knee joint and thigh. The limb had to be amputated.

Later, he was treated in Dnipro, Vinnytsia, Lviv and even in Germany, where he was fitted with his first prosthesis. With it, he returned to Ukraine, because he decided that he would fight the enemy to the end, even if it was not on the front line.

The defender did not give up his dream of running again, albeit with an artificial limb. Before his injury, he used to run a lot and often. To make this possible, he came to the NESLAMNI Centre. Here, the prosthetists made another individual stump for him, to which they attached a special active knee and running foot. And for the first time in a year and a half, Gennadiy ran. And he ran his first three hundred metres. He admits that it was not easy.

"It takes some getting used to. But the beginning has been made. Dreams come true," he says.

We were able to purchase expensive components for the sports prosthesis thanks to the joint project of the NESZLAMNI Centre and the dobro.ua charity platform, Prostheses for the Unstoppable.

Support the fundraising project for prosthetics for defenders