#Veterans

We meet 31-year-old Vitalii Veres in a hospital ward. On the bed opposite, sits his girlfriend. “I always tell her: don’t let go of me or I’ll get lost,” Vitalii jokes. A few days from now, he will have surgery to prepare a fitting for a prosthetic eye. For now—while he has some free time—he’s working on his social media blog.

MadMuscles, a globally recognized fitness application that already provides personalized workout programs to hundreds of thousands of users worldwide, has partnered with the Invictus Games community in Ukraine to launch a free adaptive workout program.

“1,2,3,4!” The commands echo across the river as blades slam in unison. On Kyiv’s Trukhaniv Island, soldiers and veterans swapped rifles for paddles, driving long dragon-headed boats down the Dnipro to the beat of a drum in Ukraine’s first-ever dragon boat race.

“I felt like I was merging with a rock I was sitting on. I called my mother to say I loved her,” says Oleh Fitkalo, describing his experience during a psychedelic session. For him and other Ukrainian veterans, psychedelic therapy is opening unexpected doors to healing from the invisible wounds of war.