- Psychiatrist Yulia Brockdorff said Ukrainian soldiers are forced to put their grief aside on the battlefield.
- Brockdorff travels to Ukraine to provide counseling and assistance, as the war continues to take a psychological toll on soldiers.
- Long service periods, PTSD and a lack of ongoing help exacerbate soldiers’ mental health issues.
Ukrainian soldiers have been serving on the front lines for so long, facing the horrors of combat, that they are forced to put aside their grief on the battlefield, visiting psychiatrist Yulia Brockdorff said.
“These losses, these injuries, these unfortunate pains compound,” Brockdorff told Business Insider.
Healthy processing of emotions and grief is pushed aside for the task at hand: defending the country from a relentless enemy. “You have to put that aside, because you have to stay focused and get on with the mission, because if you don’t get on with the mission, you’re going to suffer more losses,” she said, describing how many of the Ukrainian soldiers she has worked with view their situation.
Brockdorff is also co-founder of DAWN, a nonprofit that has supported Ukraine and has visited Ukraine several times to provide counseling services and medical equipment to soldiers since Russia began a full-scale invasion in February 2022. The last visit was in March of this year.
“We just do what we do.”
Brockdorff said he often encountered a seeming desensitization to death among soldiers defending Ukraine. “It often boils down to, ‘It’s war, these things happen,'” he said.
Brockdorff said that if grief isn’t processed immediately, it builds up and becomes harder to resolve later. While some soldiers are able to walk away from war without the trauma of witnessing loss, others experience post-traumatic stress disorder, to varying degrees.
Foreign volunteers helping to defend Ukraine shared their experiences and described the war as the largest ground conflict in Europe since World War II and a truly devastating humanitarian tragedy in terms of combat losses, but that the losses were inevitable and difficult to accept when they occurred.
“Almost every week we lose someone, not necessarily from our own business, but from a neighbor’s business or someone we know,” they told Business Insider. “Overall, our optotempo is pretty high, so we don’t have time to mourn, so we just do our job.”
“I have a lot of anger in my heart.”
Dr. Vladislav Matrenitsky, a Kyiv-based psychotherapist, author, and founder of the Expio Center for Psychotherapy, Mind-Somatic Medicine, and Psychedelic Medicine, works with Ukrainian veterans and has observed that some patients experiencing PTSD exhibit behaviors such as hypervigilance, agitation, and anxiety.
Many soldiers only process the trauma they endure on the battlefield once they return home to their families, and as PTSD sets in and symptoms surface, it can put relationships at risk — an issue that has long plagued soldiers returning from war.
“The problem is that not many people understand why this happens. They think, ‘It’s OK, it’s just stress, I just need to give it some time, rest and it will go away,'” Matrenitsky explained. “One of them told me, ‘I have so much anger inside that at night I go into the city looking for someone to fight with.'”
For others, it’s fear, not anger. Some soldiers report nightmares and panic attacks. One soldier previously told The Washington Post he had a nightmare about his tank commander being burned alive, while another dreamed of stepping on a landmine and losing his other leg.
In addition to the rising number of battlefield casualties, the lack of continued aid to Ukraine is also affecting soldiers’ mental health, Brockdorff added. “Access to supplies, medicines, and armaments directly impacts suffering, experience, self-confidence, and feeling supported,” he said.
Despite the trauma of war, soldiers often remain on the front lines and do not share its burden.
Ukraine is struggling with manpower shortages, and some of its soldiers are serving long periods on the front lines, which Brockdorff said could exacerbate soldiers’ feelings of fatigue and abandonment.
As former U.S. Army General Mark Hartling pointed out in a CNN discussion earlier this year, staying in combat for two and a half years means “incredible fatigue, psychological toll, and the morale-draining effects of being in the trenches.”
And indeed, the damage can be lasting, which is why Brockdorff says it’s important to be there for Ukrainian soldiers.
“I think it’s very important for the Ukrainian defenders to know that they’re not forgotten,” Brockdorff said. “When you’ve lived a long time and all you see are bullets and drones and dirt from trenches, it’s hard to know that someone out there really remembers you and is really willing to fight for you.”
Ryan Pickrell contributed to this report.
