Oleksandr Budko doesn’t know exactly how he was wounded. Resting near the frontline with his mortar-fire support unit in Ukraine’s north-eastern Kharkiv region, he lay down for cover in a trench while waiting for instructions from senior commanders, and started to fall asleep. Then everything changed in a moment: a shower of mud, the stench of scorched earth, and an intense pain. He hadn’t even heard the whistle of incoming fire, but it was soon clear that part of his foot was gone.
It was August 2022, the first summer of Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine – in the month afterwards, the Kharkiv region would be liberated from enemy forces by a surprise counteroffensive. Budko, heavily wounded by some sort of projectile, perhaps a shell, was evacuated to hospital for lifesaving emergency care. Over the next few days, necrosis set in and both his legs had to be amputated below the knee.
“I tried to push away bad thoughts and find meaning in life,” he says over coffee in a bookshop in central Kyiv as he signs copies of his war memoir, The Story of a Stubborn Man, based on his military diaries and published in February. “Then somehow my brain looked for the positive everywhere.”
After recovering at a rehabilitation centre in western Ukraine, he was walking again on twin prosthetics three months later. Two years on and his life is unrecognisable – a barista and aspiring graphic designer before the war, he is now a disability rights activist with tens of thousands of social media followers and a YouTube series in which he takes famous Ukrainians on city tours to highlight the country’s need to improve accessibility. As well as being a published author, he has also competed in the Invictus Games as a swimmer and performed with the United Ukrainian Ballet in California.
Now Budko, who often goes by his military call-sign Teren, or Blackthorn, is about to become even more famous as a star in an upcoming season of Ukraine’s version of reality show The Bachelor.
The new series of the show, which sees women compete to prove their compatibility with an eligible man, is scheduled to air in the autumn, with this season aiming to address attitudes towards veterans.
“There is a lack of understanding of disabled people in Ukraine, but there are more and more people with disabilities every day [because of the war]. If we can change societal attitudes, then it will be easier to push for more structural changes,” he says. “People treat us well, but they just don’t know how to interact and don’t understand the challenges we face.”
The war is now in its third year and the number of amputees in Ukraine is thought to be in the tens of thousands. The government does not share data on military casualties, but a report released in February by the UN human rights monitoring mission recorded 30,457 civilian casualties, including 19,875 suffering injuries. According to the Ukrainian ministry of social policy, the number of people living with a disability increased by 300,000 over the first 18 months of the war, bringing the country’s total to 3 million, although it did not attribute the sharp rise to Russia’s invasion.
Ukraine has a poor track record on disability rights – the European Commission, detailing cases of mistreatment, abuse and neglect, said last year that improving those rights was a priority before the country could join the European Union. Public spaces are also ill-equipped for people with mobility issues – a hangover from Soviet days, when disabled people were kept out of sight.
Budko felt he was able to cope with the trauma of what happened to him, but it was the difficulties he and others faced when trying to move around independently that made him really angry. He has been discussing improvements with Kyiv’s city council, and things are beginning to change across the country. Ramps are being installed in cities like Odesa and Chernivtsi, while Ukraine’s state-owned train operator, Ukrzaliznytsia, has bought new accessible train carriages, is upgrading stations and now provides assistance for wheelchair users.
Social attitudes are slowly changing, fuelled by the status of war veterans like Budko, who are seen as heroes. Prosthetics are now a common sight in the capital and Budko says his veteran friends often attract a lot of attention from women. Budko himself was such a popular choice for The Bachelor that the website crashed soon after it opened for applications.
“I will be able to draw a lot of attention to the problems disabled people face,” he says of the project. “But of course, this is also about love, and if I find someone, that would be great. I’m 28 and in Ukraine you should already have five children at this age!”