LVIV, Ukraine — “I’m not disabled, I’m upgraded.” These were words I remember vividly from one Ukrainian army veteran, Serhiy.

Like other Ukrainian soldiers, he identified himself by first name only for security reasons.

Serhiy had been lucky as far as injuries went. A mine had blown off his leg below the knee but he could comfortably jog and skipped about 20 reps with a jump rope, using his good leg.

He’d been far luckier, say, than a former engineer named Artem I met in Kyiv.

During Ukraine’s failed 2023 counteroffensive, a drone-dropped explosive had sheared him almost entirely in half. When I met him more than a year later in a rehabilitation center, he was walking on his arms, doing an assisted bench press, climbing ropes and said he could even comfortably drive a car.

It is as i

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