During a trip to some Lithuanian towns with a team of Vilnius’s journalists for LRT channel (Lithuanian National Radio and Television), Tetiana Titarchuk, a senior adviser and a press attaché to the Honorary consul of Lithuania in Dnipro, visited Military Rehabilitation Center in Druskininkai of Jonas Basanavicius Military Medical Service of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Lithuania.
There was held a meeting with some Ukrainian military men injured during the warfare in the ATO zone. Currently they are in good conditions undergoing rehabilitation with care and comfort, getting psychological help, and doing the individual course to improve their physical state. There was a warm vivid conversation with some soldiers from voluntary battalions who participated in the military operations in 2014-2015 and were captured, held in captivity and injured. Their stories of how they had taken a conscious decision to go to the warfare zone and made themselves prepared for that were full of pain and sorrow. One of the soldiers was lucky to survive the hell of the Battle of Ilovaisk (also known as Ilovaisk trap) but got concussed and captured. The others had been fighting in the front line of the battleground for a year and two in service. All of them have their own story and life but in general they have at least one thing in common – it is the pain and resentment about what is happening in Ukraine. After being concussed and heavily wounded the survivors were in different hospitals of the country, in particular those in Dnipro, Rivne and Kharkiv, but later were forgotten until some volunteers found and helped them to enter the rehabilitation programme funded by the Republic of Lithuania. The men are being excellently taken care of by Lithuanian doctors and experts. Ramunas Serpatauskas, Lithuanian army officer, in his own spare time is engaged in organization of theirs leisure time and is carried out the familiarization trips to Lithuania. The men were in Kaunas, Klaipeda, various museums and on that day they had an arrangement to visit Druskininkai Water Park. On their return to Ukraine, unfortunately not all of them will be able to fully return to normal life because of the complexity of injury, damage to the body and the nervous system. But the men hope that they will be useful and are willing to participate in the organizations of assistance to the wounded and their families. They expressed the desire to work with the centers of psychological help and deeply believe that our Government will make it possible to develop and improve the psychological rehabilitation programme in Ukraine.
