WROCLAW, Poland, Aug 19 (Portal) – Ukrainian soldier Dmytro Dovzhenko is particularly poignant to embrace his family back in Poland after six months on the front lines as he tries to move away from the image of a mother and child free the mutilated bodies had been bound together.
He came across the bodies in Irpin in early March as his unit fought to liberate the Kiev suburb from Russian forces.
“The child was attached to the mother and then both of them were blown up,” he said in his small apartment in the western Polish city of Wroclaw, where the family moved in 2019.
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He also showed Portal phone footage of a hospital he allegedly visited in nearby Bucha, where the bodies of people of all ages were laid out as part of the Ukrainian purge.
Russian forces are accused of committing atrocities as they seized the once-green city outside the capital at the start of the nearly six-month war.
Moscow has repeatedly denied targeting civilians in the war, calling allegations that its forces executed civilians in Bucha a “monstrous fabrication”.
The Defense Ministry in Moscow did not respond to a request for comment on Dovzhenko’s reports of the war, which Portal could not independently verify.
The 41-year-old is one of thousands of soldiers believed to have come from abroad to fight in Ukraine.
He spent the short time at home before going back to front cooking, cuddling his two small children and going for long walks with his wife Oleksandra.
“I don’t really know, I might have a very slim chance of being able to go back to my wife and kids (again). But this work has to be done,” said Dovzhenko, who heads an organization of Ukrainian veterans living abroad.
Ukrainian soldier Dmytro Dovzhenko, 41, looks on during an interview for Portal at his home in Wroclaw, Poland August 10, 2022. Portal/Kuba Stezycki
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“WE NEED MANY WEAPONS”
He fought Russian troops in eastern Donbass in 2014, the year Moscow annexed Crimea from Ukraine, but this time the conflict is more brutal, he said.
“There used to be a battle line – our country is here and there was a legal demarcation. Now there is no such line. And all the missiles, the shots, everything that Russia is using now didn’t exist before,” Dovzhenko said.
With the Russian advance relentless and the Ukrainian army outnumbered, Dovzhenko has little patience for Western voices who express concern about the course of the war but offer no concrete help.
“Someone is very worried while rockets are falling on our heads. If you’re that concerned, we can switch places. I invite them to Kharkiv or Mykolayiv. Your concern is very much needed there,” Dovzhenko said.
“We just don’t have enough guns right now. We need a lot of weapons, artillery, we need missile systems and we need new handguns for the infantry. We also need a lot of technical help.”
As he tried to reconcile the stark contrast between life in Ukraine and Poland, things he once thought normal, like streets full of pedestrians, suddenly seemed bizarre.
“I was driving and a helicopter flew over the track. Maybe it was the police, maybe an ambulance, I don’t know,” he said.
“I almost had an accident because I suddenly wanted to turn, because if you see a helicopter in Ukraine, it means that you are about to fight. So I said to myself, hold, hold, hold, hold.”
But with the sun shining in Wroclaw, Dovzhenko and his wife focused on enjoying their final hours together before returning to Ukraine.
“When he’s here, it’s always vacation,” said a tearful Oleksandra. “He’s a wonderful husband and father … We do everything so that we can be together.”
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Reporting by Joanna Plucinska and Kuba Stezycki; Adaptation by John Stonestreet
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