 | This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
Trauma has affected military veterans and civilian populations exposed to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In February 2022, Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. This conflict is characterized by a situation of high-intensity warfare, [1] [2] which was unprecedented in Europe since the Yugoslav Wars and, more generally, since World War II, which had seen high-intensity conflicts give way to asymmetrical wars. [3] Furthermore, both the Russian Armed Forces and the Ukrainian Armed Forces have been involved in war crimes and crimes against humanity during this war. [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]
From the second half of 2022, mercenary forces serving the Russian army, such as the Wagner Group, began recruiting volunteers from Russian prisons in exchange for their freedom at the end of a few months of service. [11] [12] The prisoners who accepted these conditions were mostly individuals serving heavy sentences, thus willing to risk their lives for their freedom. [13]
Other mental disorders were observed since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, including notably the Ulysses syndrome, a disorder mostly linked with refugees. [14]
Since 2014, and the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war, the Ukrainian syndrome has been observed. In December 2014, Ukrainian researchers including Mykhailo Matiash conducted a study on the matter and arrived at the conclusion that the Ukrainian syndrome is partly characterized by a "drastic" increase in the number of people suffering from PTSD, among other things. [15] Time reported in 2014 that this was one of the names given by doctors to the specific psychiatric afflictions in Ukraine at the time. [16] The syndrome was better studied since 2014, with other scholars and works being published. [17] [18] [19] The syndrome was compared to the Afghan syndrome or the Vietnam syndrome : [20]
Post-traumatic syndrome, as the experience of soldiers' participation in military conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnya, and Israel shows, has negative manifestations in the psyche of a warrior throughout his life, many years after the end of the war. It is also called the Afghan, Vietnamese or Chechen syndrome, depending on the name of the war the servicemen took part.Now we are talking about the Ukrainian military. The war in Ukraine gives another name to the Afghan syndrome – the Ukrainian syndrome.
The Ukrainian syndrome has been described as an adaptation to the realities of war, particularly within the youth [17] and more broadly within the Ukrainian population. Researchers must understand this psychological adaptation in order to propose avenues for rehabilitation. [21] In 2023, V. Ludov was part of a pannel of psychologists invited to discuss the issue for the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies of the George Washington University. [22]
During the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, as soldiers and mercenaries returned to Russia, increasingly from early 2023, crime rates in the areas where they come back witness a drastic increase. [23] Drug consumption, rapes, and murders committed by former soldiers are on the rise in Russia. [13] [23] This trend is likely explained by what is referred to as the "Ukrainian syndrome," a collection of psychological, psychiatric, or pathological disorders developed by soldiers, primarily Russians, during the invasion of Ukraine. [24] [25]
The phone call to Putin is a slang term used by some Russian police departments for torture method which consists of administering electric shocks to the person's earlobes, nose, and/or genitals. According to Amnesty International, torture with electric shocks by security forces and prison, jail, and penal colony guards is common in Russia.
The Wagner Group, officially known as PMC Wagner is a Russian state-funded private military company (PMC) controlled until 2023 by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former close ally of Russia's president Vladimir Putin. The Wagner Group has used infrastructure of the Russian Armed Forces. Evidence suggests that Wagner has been used as a proxy by the Russian government, allowing it to have plausible deniability for military operations abroad, and hiding the true casualties of Russia's foreign interventions.
On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in an escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War that started in 2014. The invasion became the largest attack on a European country since World War II. It is estimated to have caused tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilian casualties and hundreds of thousands of military casualties. By June 2022, Russian troops occupied about 20% of Ukrainian territory. About 8 million Ukrainians had been internally displaced and more than 8.2 million had fled the country by April 2023, creating Europe's largest refugee crisis since World War II. Extensive environmental damage caused by the war, widely described as an ecocide, contributed to food crises worldwide.
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Russian military and authorities have committed many deliberate attacks against civilian targets, massacres of civilians, torture and rape of women and children, torture and mutilitation of Ukrainian prisoners of war, and indiscriminate attacks in densely populated areas.
Ukraine's easternmost oblasts, Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kharkiv, are the site of a theatre of operation in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The International Legion of Territorial Defence of Ukraine, or the Ukrainian Foreign Legion, is a military unit of the Territorial Defense Forces of Ukraine composed of foreign volunteers. It was created on 27 February 2022 by the Ukrainian government at the request of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to fight against the Russian invasion of the country.
The Russo-Ukrainian War has seen foreign volunteers participate on both sides of the conflict. Most foreign fighters joined the conflict during one of two waves. The first wave happened from 2014 to 2019 during the War in the Donbas and consisted of approximately 17,241 foreign fighters. The second wave is considered by researchers to have been much larger and began in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Chechen Republic, commonly known as Chechnya, is a federal republic of Russia that has been noted in several roles during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Kadyrovite forces have fought alongside the Russian forces, while several Chechen armed volunteer formations are fighting on the Ukrainian side. International observers have noted a number of comparisons between the invasion and the First and Second Chechen Wars.
The town of Borodianka was bombed extensively by the Russian Armed Forces during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Sexual violence in the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been committed by Armed Forces of Russia, including the use of mass rape as a weapon of war. According to the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, the victims of sexual assault by Russian soldiers ranged from 4 years old to over 80 years old.
Vira Hyrych was a Ukrainian journalist and radio producer.
The torture of Russian soldiers in Mala Rohan was an incident during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine that occurred in the village of Mala Rohan. As documented by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, members of Ukrainian armed forces shot the legs of three captured Russian soldiers and tortured Russian soldiers who were wounded. The incident is likely to have occurred on the evening of March 25, 2022 and was first reported following the publication on social media of a video of unknown authorship between March 27 and March 28. As a case of summary execution and torture of prisoners of war, the incident might qualify as a war crime.
Russia has built numerous defense lines in Ukraine during its invasion.
Oleksiy Opanasovych Vadaturskyi was a Ukrainian agricultural and grain logistics businessman and the founder of Nibulon, the largest grain logistics company in Ukraine. He was one of the wealthiest Ukrainians.
The battle of Bakhmut was a major battle in and around the city of Bakhmut between the Russian Armed Forces and Ukrainian defenders for capture of the city during the larger eastern Ukraine campaign. It was one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the war so far.
The battle of Soledar was a series of military engagements in and around the urban-type settlement of Soledar during the battle of Donbas in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Mozart Group was a private military company operating in Ukraine during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Mozart Group was composed of Western volunteers with military experience and provided military training, civilian evacuations and rescue, and humanitarian aid distribution.
During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, both Ukrainian and Russian/separatist prisoners of war have suffered several forms of abuse, such as mistreatment, exposure to public curiosity, torture, or even execution.
The Wagner Group, also known as PMC Wagner, a Russian paramilitary organization also described as a private military company (PMC), a network of mercenaries, and a de facto unit of the Russian Ministry of Defence (MoD) or Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU, has conducted operations in Ukraine since early 2014.
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
