The boy has been serving in the Armed Forces since the age of 18, and his desire to defend his country appeared in school. Therefore, his path to his dream is connected precisely with the return to his brothers, with the opportunity to once again stand up for the defense of Ukraine.
In September 2016, Vitalik went to the front line in the Donetsk region as a BMP driver-mechanic as part of a combat unit. Two years later, “at ground zero”, the boy received a bullet wound through the chest – an enemy sniper worked.
“Actually, I rehabilitated myself, because there was no rehabilitation then. I’m even sometimes surprised that now some guys lie down and don’t appreciate what they have. They think it’s always been that way, because that’s how it should be. But I found a time when there was not even a hint of such a thing – neither psychological nor physical rehabilitation. None at all.”
On February 24, 2022, the boy was in Poland, but already at 4 p.m. that day he was sitting on a bus to Ukraine. Immediately from the bus, on the morning of February 25, he went to the local Military Commissariat in the Zhytomyr region. And two days later, as part of a combat unit, he left for positions to deter the enemy in the Zhytomyr region.
In the battles in the East, during a tank attack, Vitalik lost his arm.
“And as soon as we go outside, cluster shells fall in front of us. Two of the medic’s legs were cut off, a shrapnel hit my leg. But I didn’t even feel it, considering that my hand was numb,” he recalls.
Then there was treatment, adaptation to the life of a superman and rehabilitation, which is still ongoing. As part of his treatment at the Superhumans Center, Vitalik traveled to Munich to the OpenBionics office and already received a bionic prosthesis manufactured by them. The boy quickly mastered the interaction with the hand and demonstrates tremendous results.