Petrushyn Artur, 16 years old

Winner of the 2025 Essay Contest, 1st place

KP “Kharkiv Lyceum No. 143” of the Kharkiv City Council

Teacher who inspired the essay: Kotenko Valeriia Oleksandrivna

“The event that changed everything. The power of help”

Do you love football the way I love it? Spring 2024, May… Finally, the end of classes, and I just want to kick the ball around with my friends! Here we are already on the school stadium… An explosion! A terrible screech of metal, pain, blood, shock… Someone is helping me and my friends, everything is like in a fog… Ambulances, rescuers, familiar faces of teachers and completely unfamiliar faces of strangers… But I realize all this later, and at that moment—only shock and pain! My leg…

That explosion divided my life into before and after… Just like the first explosions in Kharkiv in February 2022. Before and… after!

Yes, my life changed suddenly. My mother, so young and beautiful, got her first wrinkles from sleepless nights, from worrying about me! Doctors fought, and there was hope that the foot would be saved! Help was coming from everywhere! But doctors are not gods, unfortunately; amputation, treatment, prosthetics… You ask how I’m doing? I’m holding on! I’m a man! My mother is beside me, my grandmother, my whole family. How could I give up?

Their love saved me! And then again in Kyiv, at the National Specialized Children’s Hospital "Ohmatdyt", during a massive missile strike… And faith, and a mother’s prayer!

What else helped me endure, not lose hope for a better life and return to a full life? I saw our defenders, wounded, with amputations! They, courageous and brave, looked death in the eye there, on the battlefield… Their words of support gave me strength. How could I back down, give up? With my own example of resilience and fighting the illness, I tried to support their belief too, that a prosthesis is not a sentence!

Life goes on, loved ones are waiting at home – parents, families, children!

Besides my family and our defenders, so many other people and organizations from around the world gave me the opportunity to understand that I am not alone, not left one-on-one with my trouble! That I am needed, not forgotten, cared for, supported! The city of Kharkiv and the mayor provided all possible help – financial, medical, rehabilitative. Phone calls and visits from the school administration; friends and classmates were eager to come to the hospital, asking what was needed to help; Alla the fairy and her pastries – all of this is just a drop in the ocean of moral and material support that poured in from everywhere!

But there are moments I especially want to remember. Andriy Shevchenko!

The legend of Ukrainian football visited me personally, and that meeting gave me wings, gave me strength, and I was ready to keep fighting – to overcome physical pain, to go through exhausting physical work on myself, to get used to the prosthesis. And also the course of physical rehabilitation and psychological recovery at the “Borzhava” sanatorium, where I rode horses, breathed in salt, and swam in a hot thermal pool. This helped me recover, because salt water promotes healthy joint function. And all this thanks to the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation!

And again I understood: I am not alone! Believe me, this is so necessary for everyone who suffered from the aggression of the occupying country.

You know that Kharkiv is an unbreakable city! It is reinforced concrete! But not only that… It’s a place where Kharkiv residents draw energy for life in times of war, under constant shelling. Dolphins – one of the wonders of our city! They are the ones who rescued me and continue to rescue me in moments of despair (and you thought such moments don’t happen? They do! But I keep fighting!) These animals are smarter than many people. From communicating with dolphins comes only positivity, such a burst of emotion and optimism that I’m ready to return to them again and again!

Many thanks to the Kharkiv Dolphinarium for this opportunity to interact with the “people of the sea.”

And what about football? I believe that I will definitely be able to play it! In a month I will turn 16! The event that happened on May 8, 2024, changed my life. In the hardest times of my life, I felt the power of help from honest people around the world. My interview with CNN was heard in the European Parliament as testimony that war can bring only suffering, destruction, and pain. I would really like peace, the kind all of Ukraine is waiting for! I believe in the victory of good over evil, in our victory over the occupiers! Our land is paying a high price, so victory will come, because “The Cossack bloodline will never perish!” Glory to Ukraine and its heroic people!