"If I could hold a Russian by the throat, my hand would heal quicker!" Stories of the badly wounded - hromadske

"At first I came here for an amputation," Oleksandr says in the corridor of a Polish hospital, showing us his right hand.

Oleksandr Sivash, a tractor driver by education and a driver by his main profession, with the beginning of a full-scale war rushed together with other fellow villagers to defend his native Hadiach district in Poltava region. This operation, during which ordinary volunteers actually resisted the Russians with their bare hands, setting Russian equipment on fire, will later be called the "Hadiach Safari".

After Oleksandr pounced on the Russian "Ural", he was shot by an enemy sniper. For the third year, he is treating a severely injured hand.

For the third time, Oleksandr is visiting the Polish city of Chelyadz, where Canadian surgeons come for a few weeks every six months to save severely wounded Ukrainian soldiers and civilians.

"I have a damaged elbow, it was planned to have it replaced here. But when I got here, they refused to amputate and said they would try to do something with what was left. And they did it almost perfectly. They sawed the bone into pieces, fastened it, fixed it - and here it is," says Oleksandr, who has already started to push himself on his hands.

Since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the fifth mission of the Canada Ukraine Surgical Aid Program (CUSAP) has taken place in Poland, within which Canadian plastic surgeons and traumatologists operate on wounded Ukrainian military and civilians.

In total, there have already been 12 such CUSAP missions - since 2014, when Canadian doctors came to Ukraine – to Kyiv, Lviv and Odesa.

See the stories of seriously wounded Ukrainians and the long-term treatment of their limbs in the hromadske report.

See the first part about super-complicated operations on traumatized faces here.