Ward for War Veterans - July 28th 2025

July 28th 2025

Yuriy reflects on his experience with illness, the enduring effects of war in Ukraine, and the striking parallels between his own journey and that of his grandfather, both marked by their status as war veterans.

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TRANSCRIPT: (Apple Podcasts & Podbean app users can enjoy accurate closed captions) 

It is July 28th

And it's beautiful rainy day. I had stayed silent for quite a while, but it wasn't by choice. For the past two weeks, I've been sick with COVID. I have to admit these were two terrible weeks at times it even felt like we might be my last. These days, every illness seems harder and more severe than the previous one, and yet during the first year of a full scale war. I did not get sick at all. Despite having to sleep on concrete floors or frozen grounds, my body somehow mobilized itself and made it through the whole year without any illness. Only my teeth started falling out.

Then at the beginning of my second year of service, something broke inside. And I began to fall ill, bronchitis, flu then flu again, then COVID again. It felt like my immune system had just stopped working. I tried to push through every illness on my feet, refusing to go to the hospital, but it did not always work. I remember the first time I found myself in a hospital ward that had a sign on the door. Ward for war veterans. The sign dated back to Soviet times, still written in Russian. I remember thinking then: how did I end up here in this kind of ward?

The thing is, for many years there was only one "war" in the public consciousness. The USSR fought in plenty of wars, but officially they were called something absurd: fulfilling international duty assisting fraternal socialist nations, or something like that. And there was only one real war, the second World war.

Or rather,, just the part of it starting from June 1941, when Hitler attacked his former ally, Stalin, and launched a war against the Soviet Union. Only the veterans of that war were considered true veterans and it was them that signs referred to when we said a hospital ward or tram seat was reserved for war veterans.

For me, a war veteran had always been someone old and very ill- like my grandfather. In his final years, he was always in wards, veteran wards, constantly being operated on by doctors trying to prolong his life a bit more. And now it suddenly turns out that I'm a veteran too. Well, I'm definitely sick like one, unfortunately.

By the way, about a year ago when I was in Kharkiv, I happened to find my grandfather's veteran ID. He received it from the Ukrainian authorities after the collapse of USSR. And you know what? It looks exactly the same as the one I received 30 years after my grandfather.