“It is necessary that the motivation for life is turned on” – Newspaper Kommersant No. 32 (7477) of 02/21/2023

In the State Duma on Monday, an inter-factional meeting was held on the issues of medical, psychological, social and professional rehabilitation of participants in a special military operation (SVO) in Ukraine. Deputies, officials, doctors and public figures gathered to discuss new approaches to the development of measures and programs for rehabilitation and habilitation. However, the conversation, as Kommersant noted, turned out to be wider and ended with an unexpected proposal: according to a veteran of military operations in Afghanistan, the most wonderful rehabilitation is to “live in peace.”

The rehabilitation of participants in a special military operation who were injured, maimed or ill in the course of performing combat missions was discussed in the State Duma at the initiative of the A Just Russia – For Truth faction. opening meeting, its leader, Sergei Mironov, recalled that a list of instructions was drawn up following a meeting between Vladimir Putin and the mothers of servicemen in November last year. One of the tasks is to develop a comprehensive rehabilitation program. Deputies, the government, and regional authorities are now working on its solution. Mr. Mironov first of all stated that “in no case” should the “Afghan experience” (the military operations that the USSR conducted in Afghanistan in 1979-1989) be repeated: “When our heroes returned after fulfilling the order of their homeland, and they were told, that they were not sent there. We know these terrible figures both by the number of suicides and by the number of convicted Afghans. We must draw conclusions from what happened and be ready to carry out comprehensive medical and social, psychological and other types of rehabilitation for our victorious soldiers. No one doubts that they will return with victory,” said Sergei Mironov, and the entire small hall of the State Duma applauded in response.

The deputy noted that the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Labor and the Ministry of Defense are now dealing with the rehabilitation of participants in the SVO, and expressed concern that it would be “like in the well-known proverb”: seven nannies have a child without an eye.

He singled out the regions where work is already underway in this direction. In particular, in the Nizhny Novgorod Region, family members of SVO participants sign a military social contract, under which they receive various types of assistance. However, in his opinion, a “single federal standard of rehabilitation” should be developed.

Sergey Tsarenko, director of the NMIC “Therapeutic and Rehabilitation Center of the Ministry of Health of Russia”, actually explained in his speech what Mr. Mironov had in mind. He noted that rehabilitation should be divided into several areas. For example, the patient rehabilitation system with traumatic brain injury “well-established within the framework of the existing procedures for the provision of care” of the medical department. As for the patients with spinal injury, here “there are fewer opportunities for rehabilitation”: “A patient with such a problem can only be taught how to use the bladder, rectum, and teach how to prevent bedsores. And then there are the problems of habilitation, and this is not a question for the Ministry of Health, but for a specific department that is engaged in psychological rehabilitation (Ministry of Labour.— “b”)”. Likewise, patients with amputations, and not only military personnel, but also residents of new Russian territories, Mr. Tsarenko emphasized: in an institution subordinate to the Ministry of Health, they will carry out amputation, prepare the stump, but the Ministry of Labor is responsible for providing and installing the prosthesis. “Therefore, if we are going to do this in the Ministry of Health institutions, we need to create a single technology, otherwise we will drown in interdepartmental interactions. Or give everything to the Ministry of Labor,” said Sergei Tsarenko.

The head of the Health Protection Committee, Dmitry Khubezov, who recently received the Order of Courage for working in a military hospital near the front line in the territory of the LPR, said that the participants in the special operation needed constant “proactive psychological help.” He also added that “our guys and defenders” need to be provided with all the best that is in the world, not only with rehabilitation means, but also with modern methods, which already requires the training of specialists.

At the same time, at the beginning of the meeting, Sergei Mironov sadly announced that, for example, universities in his native St. Petersburg had stopped training physiotherapists, and admitted that the shortage of personnel would only increase further.

The head of the “Committee of Families of Warriors of the Fatherland”, a member of the HRC, Yulia Belekhova, suggested that it was necessary to create a “social family passport” so that relatives of a serviceman, mobilized or volunteer could get help as simply as possible – just by going to “Gosuslugi”. “When we come to the fighters for a ribbon, they tell us: “Make sure that our families are taken care of, so that they don’t need anything.” According to Ms. Belekhova, the families of the missing should not be left without help and attention. And the wounded participants of the NWO, she stressed, should be provided with a route for their future social life already in the hospital: to help them understand what they want to do next, where they can get additional education.

A Just Russia deputy Oleg Nilov made an original proposal. He recalled that in Russia there are 700,000 deputies of various levels and millions more of officials: “If each deputy takes care of a family of the dead, the wounded, and those who simply returned from the war and are there today, do you understand what powerful therapy it will be? – At this point, veterans of the Airborne Forces sitting in the hall clapped especially loudly. – This is what I propose to think about for all parties. So that everyone inside the parties, inside the factions, is woken up at night: “And who is under your care, give the call sign, last name, first name. How are you helping him?”

The speech of the head of the “Society of invalids of the war in Afghanistan – the Moscow House of Soldiers’ Heart” Mikhail Yashin was also out of the ordinary. “We are now talking about an abstract combat veteran, about abstract participants in the NWO. And let me ask you a question: did you ever see them in the eyes, did you communicate with them? What kind of specialized education are you talking about, if at first it is necessary that his motivation for life turn on? What psychological state? You know that post-traumatic stress disorder is a psychiatric disease in our country and they put it in a fool’s house. What combat officer, decorated for bravery and heroism, would go and admit that he has PTSD symptoms?”

Mr. Yashin, who lost his leg at the age of 19, complained that he could not get into the former hospital for war veterans without a queue, which became a geriatric center for all citizens during the coronavirus pandemic.

“But what about the veterans? In general, within the walls of the State Duma, it is necessary to raise the issue of the status of combat veterans. Now we started talking about SVO. Didn’t this problem exist before? And what condition did the guys from the Caucasus come in? During the second campaign, Vladimir Vladimirovich (Putin.— “b”) began to put things in order, motivated with money. Do you know that the guys with this money came, sat down and drank? Mikhail Yashin continued. “If the Afghans came to the officials with grenades, they will do something completely different here.”

Another veteran of military operations in Afghanistan, Aleksey Pyata, asked for the floor outside the meeting timetable. He said that he was in rehabilitation only once, in 1986, a year after demobilization, he was sent to a sanatorium by a shipyard in Arkhangelsk. He added that many of his comrades still do not have prostheses, and suggested that the same fate awaits most of the participants in the NWO. “Therefore, I think that the most wonderful rehabilitation is for each of us, men, and for women who send us to war and meet us in some form – like me, brave, with amputations, with head problems or in a zinc coffin “So the most important rehabilitation is to live in peace,” said the veteran of the war in Afghanistan. “So let’s talk about how the war ends faster.”

The meeting lasted over four hours. Its organizers promised to send all the proposals to the government.

Natalya Kostarnova