The soldier underwent several unsuccessful surgeries in Ukraine.
Roman Lutsiuk, a Ukrainian volunteer soldier, was wounded twice in combat — first losing several fingers, and then, after returning to the front, sustaining serious injuries after being shot several times in the abdomen.
He’s now receiving care at Yale-New Haven Hospital. In October, he'll undergo major reconstructive surgery to organs in his digestive system.
On Thursday, the Lutsiuk family was happy to be sitting together in the shade of the grape vines at St. Michael’s Ukrainian Catholic Church in New Haven. They had been apart for nearly eight months. Now, in a place new to them by sight and language, they were making small talk via a translator with a U.S. senator.
Lutsiuk’s case was brought to the attention of Yale-New Haven by a group of Ukrainian doctors from Philadelphia working to get wounded Ukrainian soldiers treatment in the United States.
U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal, informed by the Connecticut Ukrainian community of Lutsiuk's separation from his family, helped Lutsiuk’s daughters -- Anastasia, seven, and Alina, 15 -- acquire visas so they could visit him in Connecticut this summer.
Myron Melnyk, a parishioner at St. Michael’s translating for Lutsiuk, said Lutsiuk had undergone several unsuccessful surgeries in Ukraine, so bringing him to the U.S. was imperative to his survival.
“Up until now, they’ve been kind of figuring out how they’re going to do all these connections to his esophagus, to his intestines, to other organs that need to be reconstructed. In October, they’re going to give him the full operation to give him a digestive system for the first time since he was wounded in November,” Melnyk said.
Lutsiuk is now connected to an I.V. 15 hours a day. His wife Tanya, who has been with Lutsiuk in New Haven since he arrived in January, cares for him where they are staying in a building owned by the church that was converted into an apartment for their use.
The family is from Lutsk, a city in Northwest Ukraine, “about as far away from the Eastern province as you can get,” Melnyk said.
But Melnyk said Lutsiuk's dedication to his country compelled him to join a volunteer battalion fighting against separatists in the East.
Lutsiuk’s struggle for survival made for hard times for his family. When Lutsiuk was in a military hospital in Ukraine, the doctors couldn’t do much for him, said Reverend Iura Godenciuc, the pastor at St. Michael’s. Lutsiuk’s daughters weren’t allowed to see him.
“Even when he came here, nobody had told the hospital that he didn’t have his stomach,” Godenciuc said. “[Lutsiuk] was also surprised. He said, ‘Where is my stomach?’”
Blumenthal, who supports the U.S. delivery of defense weapons to Ukraine, said Lutsiuk’s story is a reminder that Ukraine is still entrenched in conflict with pro-Russian separatists.
“It’s really a humanitarian cause, that fate of the Ukrainian people, most especially the wounded in this fight for freedom. Because the medicine there is very elemental compared to this country and so he was fortunately was brought here and saved, but his family was there,” Blumenthal said.
According to U.N. estimates, fighting in Ukraine has resulted in the deaths of more than 6,500 people since it broke out in April 2014.
