The right leg is stiff and swollen under the camouflage, the trembling hand holds a cigarette that the young soldier cannot even smoke.
Sitting on a plastic chair, with his crutches leaning back, he has just arrived at the Main Military Clinical Hospital in Kiev, who knows from which war front in Ukraine.
He looks at his wife almost begging, she puts a hand on his shoulder and looks back with tenderness, but she seems to have no words to comfort him.
What speaks for him, however, are his celestial eyes, large but empty, shiny, wide open, desperate.
"Sorry, I don't want to talk," says the soldier, almost mortified, pointing several times at his injured leg.
"It's better for you. You wouldn't want to know what they did to me", he justifies himself, unable to hold back the tears.
The entrance to the hospital, defended by armed men and Frisian horses, is a coming and going of people, soldiers of all grades and all ages, doctors, volunteers who bag on their shoulders waiting to be enrolled, wives with bags of food and clothes for injured husbands, staring at the door waiting for permission to enter.
Outside another ambulance arrives without sirens.
Since February 24, the most crowded departments are surgery and traumatology.
"We do nothing but amputate limbs, disinfect pus-filled wounds, remove metal splinters from bodies", explains to ANSA Maksym, a nurse in a green coat during a break.
"The last case I treated? We cut off the leg of a 22-year-old soldier," he adds.
Little more than the same age as that wounded boy,
before the war Maksym worked in a children's hospital.
"With children it was even more difficult," she confesses.
Vasyl, called Gutsul from the name of the ethnic group in the Carpathians, gold teeth and small in stature, on the other hand, is a river in flood.
He has hand injuries but gesticulates and talks nonstop in telling about him about war.
The first days around Kiev, Irpin, Gostomel, Chernihiv, "it was an artillery hell".
Then in Chernobyl, on March 29, "we saw the Russians flee from the power plant. We wanted to shoot them but the commander did not let us", he remembers regretfully and boasting of having "killed about fifty enemies alone".
With the redeployment of Moscow troops on the eastern front, Vasyl was also transferred to the Donbass in early April.
And that's where he gets wounded: "We were digging a trench. My mate had just walked away when a Russian tank came out and started firing on us.
Luckily our people also arrived, otherwise I would have died ". First transferred to a hospital in Dnipro, he arrived in Kiev a week ago." If it were up to me, I would go back to the front immediately - he says, inflating his chest, a yellow and blue bracelet around the drip bandage -.
My teammates fight on the pitch, while I'm standing here ".
