Serhiy Kachemazov was a paratrooper in the Ukrainian army’s elite 79th Airborne Brigade.
He died on Nov. 3, 2017 — but not on the battlefield. Suffering from depression and severe headaches brought on by injuries he sustained from heavy shelling during combat, Kachemazov took his own life in his apartment in the city of Beryslav in Kherson Oblast, some 450 kilometers southeast of Kyiv.
The former soldier had been discharged from the army after being badly wounded in the bloody fighting for Donetsk airport in late 2014. In civilian life, he was stalked by depression and could sometimes be delusional, according to his friends and relatives.
But when he sought treatment at a public hospital in the city of Kherson, civilian medics turned him away.
“We’re tired of you. You veterans want too much,” they said.
That was the last straw. Shortly after, Kachemazov took an overdose of drugs and died at home. In a suicide note to his mother, he asked forgiveness for what he had done. The note ended: “Nobody wants the Donbas veterans.”
Kachemazov is just one of many hundreds of Ukrainian veterans of Russia’s war in the Donbas who have killed themselves due to untreated post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the scourge of survivors of modern warfare.
But despite there now being at least 330,000 Donbas war veterans, many of whom have seen intense combat, Ukraine still does not run a fully-funded, effective, permanent and universal state program of psychological support for its former soldiers.
Instead, after being released from the military, many Ukrainian soldiers are left alone to deal with the lingering shock of war and the depressing lack of prospects in civilian life. Many begin using alcohol and drugs to cope.
Some simply can’t cope at all.
Statistics unclear
Such has been the neglect of this problem in Ukraine that nobody even knows exactly how many soldiers and officers have killed themselves because of PTSD.
Different officials and government agencies give conflicting figures.
On April 24, Ukrainian lawmaker Oleksandr Tretyakov raised a stir by claiming that over 1,000 veterans have committed suicide since 2014.
The next day, Ukraine’s chief military prosecutor, Anatoliy Matios, said the National Pre-Trial Investigations Register as of April 1 had recorded at least 554 suicides of soldiers since 2014.
Later, the presidential envoy for veteran affairs, Vadym Svyrydenko, admitted there were no precise statistics on the issue.
“We can’t know the true amount, because many of the suicides recorded nowadays … concern currently serving military personnel,” he told U.S. broadcaster RFE/RL on April 25.
“But there are boys who have been demobilized, and if they commit suicide, we don’t know who is recording these cases.”
Experts and lawyers polled by the Kyiv Post agreed the official figures on the issue are all far from being accurate. While each of the country’s security and defense agencies make their own estimates, nobody has kept accurate numbers on suicides from PTSD.
“These are very complicated statistics,” said Lesya Vasylenko, the leader of the Legal Hundred rights group, which provides legal aid to soldiers. “It’s very hard to find out if a demobilized soldier committed suicide because of a reaction to combat stress, or if it was because of some other trouble in his life.”
“In Ukraine, no agency does this.”
Slow progress
The suicide rate among the currently serving military, primarily those engaged in combat on a regular basis, is also kept secret.
On Feb. 21, chief military prosecutor Matios claimed that two or three army servicemen commit suicide every week. The military later withdrew that claim, while stating that the actual data was not for public disclosure.
According to the General Staff, the suicide rate among active service military was 0.007 percent per 100,000 troops as of late February 2018, which corresponds to the worldwide average figure. For comparison, the Western militaries during the Iraq War had an average suicide rate of 0.026 percent, according to Major General Oleh Hruntkovskiy, the head of the Department of Psychological Support of the Armed Forces.
Specialists working with soldiers and civilians affected by the hostilities in Donbas generally agree that the army has made some progress in providing psychological support for its active duty personnel.
“It would be unfair to say that nothing has been done by the military in this field,” said civilian psychologist Kateryna Pronoza from Povernennya (the Return), a Kyiv-based mental health center.
“Over the past few years we’ve seen a considerable number of newly trained staff specialists render support in combat units, using new, modern manuals. And now every military hospital in the war zone has its own psychologists that diagnose and treat wounded or shell-shocked soldiers.
“Besides, the Ministry of Defense occasionally sends servicemen to non-government entities like us.”
“The situation in the army has improved since 2014,” Pronoza agreed. “The days when morale officers were forced to dig trenches instead of doing their proper job are long gone.”
Despite that, the problem of combat stress among serving personnel is still causing tragedies. For instance, 25-year-old Junior Lieutenant Dmytro Balabukh, a widely respected officer from the 72nd Mechanized Brigade with an excellent command record in combat, on Feb. 12 killed a civilian man with a knife after a minor scuffle at a bus stop in Kyiv.
Years of neglect
Once servicemen return to civilian life, they are no longer the responsibility of the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff.
Army veterans are supposed to be the concern of the Ministry of Social Policy, but veteran affairs there are practically paralyzed. According to Matios, the chief military prosecutor, in 2018, only Hr 109 million ($4.1 million) was allocated from the state budget to provide psychological assistance, social rehabilitation and recreation services to the 300,000 Donbas war veterans.
Worse still, Matios wrote on his Facebook page on April 25 that the ministry’s veteran support program had not even been launched in 2018, as the ministry had failed to approve the regulator acts that would allow it to sign contracts to render services to veterans.
“The procedure for rending psychological assistance has not been approved yet,” Vasylenko from the Legal Hundred confirmed. “It has been drafted, but it has failed to clear all of the bureaucratic hurdles of the government.”
“Every single sheet of paper has to be agreed with other corresponding executive bodies. Sometimes, regulations from the social ministry simply get stuck in the Cabinet of Ministers, where, for instance, the Ministry of Finance hesitates about approving something.”
Over the past four years of war, the Ministry of Social Policy hasn’t even drawn up a comprehensive strategy of veteran support — the basic document that would shape state policy in this area, Vasylenko said.
“There are no standard procedures for rendering psychological assistance to retired combat veterans in Ukraine,” says Vasylenko. “What kind of help must be given, how and where a veteran or his family can receive it, which specialists, under which requirements can provide their services — none of this has been regulated yet.”
Without a proper set of rules, the issue gets stuck in a regulatory quagmire.
“For instance, the law on military service in Ukraine mandates that every serviceperson engaged in hostilities is obliged to receive compulsory psychological rehabilitation,” Vasylenko says. “But this this legislation conflicts with the healthcare act, which says that no person can be forced to obtain medical assistance.”
The Ministry of Social Policy did not reply to a request for comment.
New ministry
With the up to 20 state institutions involved in veteran issues failing to help matters, hopes are being pinned on the new ministry of veteran affairs, the creation of which Ukrainian lawmakers initiated on Feb. 27.
According to lawmaker Ivan Vynnyk of the 139-member Bloc of Petro Poroshenko faction in parliament, the ministry will be responsible for supporting all living Ukrainian veterans from all conflicts starting from World War II. It will be based on the model of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, he said.
However, the ministry will be launched no earlier than in fiscal year 2019, Ukrainian Social Affairs Minister Andriy Reva said on April 5.
And civilian activists fear that if the new ministry simply assumes all of those responsibilities, without fundamentally changing the model of veteran support, it will be doomed to breed even more bureaucracy, and still be ineffective.
“Psychological and medical diagnosis after dismissal from service is absolutely vital, and this is not what war retired veterans are getting today,” Vasylenko said.
“And after a combatant returns home from war, the first thing you must ensure is that he or she quickly gets a job,” she said.
“In civilian life, if a veteran finds some activity, some business to do, he or she will find their place in life, and peace of mind behind the frontlines.”
