Prince Harry met with injured Ukrainian service personnel in Kyiv on Friday during a visit in which he will launch new initiatives to help rehabilitate them via his Invictus Games vehicle. File Photo by Hugo Philpott/UPI | License Photo
Prince Harry and a team from his Invictus Games non-governmental organization arrived in Kyiv on Friday to visit with Ukrainian service personnel battling severe injuries sustained in the war with Russia.
King Charles’ second son said he wanted to do “everything possible” to help wounded military personnel recover, many of whom had life-changing injuries.
The visit was at the invitation of Superhumans, a Ukrainian organization that provides prosthetics and uses the latest techniques to treat and rehabilitate large numbers of Ukrainians with significant and extensive physical and mental injuries.
Harry and the team from his Invictus Games Foundation, which runs a biennial international athletics competition for disabled military personnel, will launch new projects to support rehabilitation efforts in Kyiv with a longer-term ambition of rolling them out across the country.
Ukraine does not publish data on military casualties, but tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians are believed to have lost at least one limb, either on the battlefield or in bombardment of towns and cities, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
One estimate this year put the number of people left with permanent disabilities at 130,000 people, with the government now putting sport front and center of its rehabilitation strategy, something it attributes to Harry’s Invictus movement.
“We cannot stop the war, but what we can do is do everything we can to help the recovery process. We have to keep it in the forefront of people’s minds. I hope this trip will help to bring it home to people because it’s easy to become desensitized to what has been going on,” Harry told The Guardian en route to Ukraine by train.
The prince was due to visit with a group of 200 military veterans, meet Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko and tour the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War during the visit.
Harry, who traveled to Superhumans’ main trauma center in the western city of Lviv in April, said Friday’s visit came about due to a chance meeting with Superhumans founder and CEO Olga Rudnieva in New York.
He said he agreed to go because Rudnieva told him his physical presence on the ground in Ukraine was the number one thing he could do to help.
“In Lviv, you don’t see much of the war. It is so far west. This is the first time we will see the real destruction of the war,” said Harry
A Ukrainian team has participated in four Invictus Games since its first appearance in 2017, most recently in Vancouver in February, and now represents one of the main planks of the movement.
Harry traveled to Ukraine from London, where he held his first meeting with the king in 19 months on Wednesday, visited a research facility for treatment of blast injuries and laid a wreath at Windsor Castle to mark the third anniversary of the death of his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth.
On Tuesday, on a visit to Nottingham, he made a $1.5 million personal donation to the British charity Children in Need, specifically to support its work with groups helping young people impacted by violence.
