Four lynx “illegally released” into the Scottish Highlands have been captured by park rangers in a rollercoaster two-day rescue effort.

The search began on Wednesday afternoon when two lynx were spotted in the Cairngorms National Park, one of the last truly wild places remaining in the UK. The animals were captured the following day, lured with bait into humane traps.

Two additional lynx, which appeared to have been “deliberately abandoned,” were later spotted on camera traps Thursday night in the same region, according to the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS).

The 48-hour rescue effort was initially declared a victory by conservation groups, but the discovery of the medium-sized cats – which once roamed free in Scotland – has sparked fears that some might be taking rewildling into their own hands.

Lynx tend to ignore humans and don’t generally pose a threat, according to wildlife experts. Some conservationists have called for the lynx to be released back into the Scottish Highlands, but reintroducing the lost species has long been a thorny issue.

David Field, chief executive of RZSS, told BBC Radio 4’s Today program that there are “rogue rewilders out there” who ignore international best practice with regard to the reintroduction of species.

“They are impatient and then proceed in a way which is this rebellious rogue rewilding. That’s really sad and that’s a real, real risk,” he said.

Edward Mountain, Conservative MSP for the Highlands and Islands, said the second lynx capture “would suggest a concerted approach to illegally reintroduce lynx,” according to PA Media.

Police Scotland and rangers from the Cairngorms National Park Authority joined the mammoth rescue effort and inquiries are being made into how the animals ended up roaming free in the park.

The second pair of cats were captured at around 6:30 p.m. local time on January 10 within the Kingussie region of the park and taken to the nearby Highland Wildlife Park to be assessed by vets, RZSS said.

The cats will be moved into quarantine for 30 days at Edinburgh Zoo, RZSS added.

“It’s been a rollercoaster 48 hours, with people working throughout the day and night, in some extremely challenging conditions,” Dr Helen Senn, RZSS Head of Conservation said in a statement Friday evening.

Senn added that they don’t think there are any more lynx in the park but will continue to monitor the release site.

Highland Wildlife Park said in a statement on Facebook that they “condemn the illegal release of these lynx in the strongest possible terms.”

“It is very unlikely they would have survived in the wild,” the park added.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said forces operating in the Kursk region of Russia have captured two North Korean soldiers, marking the first time that Ukraine has captured alive soldiers from the isolated state.

“Our soldiers have captured North Korean military personnel in the Kursk region. Two soldiers, though wounded, survived and were transported to Kyiv, where they are now communicating with the Security Service of Ukraine,” Zelensky said Saturday in a statement on X, which include several images of the injured soldiers.

According to Ukrainian and Western assessments, some 11,000 North Korean troops are deployed in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces occupy several hundred square kilometers after staging a cross-border incursion in August last year.

Last week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said more than 1,000 North Korean forces had been killed or wounded in Kursk in the last week of December.

Zelensky said of the two Korean soldiers who had been captured: “This was not an easy task: Russian forces and other North Korean military personnel usually execute their wounded to erase any evidence of North Korea’s involvement in the war against Ukraine.”

Soldiers in bunk beds

The Ukrainian Security Service, the SBU, released video purportedly showing the soldiers.

In the video, the SBU spokesman says one of the North Koreans was captured on January 9 by Ukrainian special forces, and the other by Ukrainian paratroopers.

“They are being held in appropriate conditions that meet the requirements of international law,” the SBU said.

The video shows the two soldiers in bunk beds in a cell. One has a wound to his jaw. Neither is heard speaking. An unidentified doctor says that the second soldier has a fractured leg.

The SBU spokesman said that “communication with them is carried out through interpreters of Korean,” in cooperation with South Korean intelligence service.

Saturday’s capture is the first time that Ukraine has captured North Korea soldiers alive from the battlefield.

The SBU released images of a Russian military ID card issued in the name of another person from Tuva in Russia, which it said was being carried by one of the captured soldiers. According to the SBU, the soldier said he had been issued the document in Russia last autumn. He also said that some of North Korea’s combat units had just one-week training with Russian troops. The other captive had no documents, the SBU said.

The soldier said he had been in the North Korean military and had thought he was being sent to Russia for training rather than combat, according to the SBU’s account.

It comes as Ukraine on Sunday renewed its offensive on Kursk, where its troops have been holding territory after launching a shock incursion last summer.

Ukraine’s military said on Tuesday that it had conducted a precision strike on a Russian military command post near the town of Belaya.

Although Kyiv’s troops quickly advanced through Kursk in the summer – in the first ground invasion of Russia by a foreign power since World War II – Russia eventually managed to push the forces back. The lines had been mostly static for weeks before Ukraine’s latest push.

In his daily address on Monday, Zelensky said Kursk offensive was important in preventing Russian from redirecting its troops to Donetsk and other regions in eastern and southern Ukraine.

Despite both sides being drained after nearly three years of war, frontline fighting has ramped up in recent weeks. With Donald Trump set to return to the White House this month – promising to end the war in a day, without saying how – Moscow and Kyiv appear to be making an 11th-hour push to gobble up territory and strengthen their negotiating hands ahead of potential peace talks.

This story has been updated.

Caroline Darian, the daughter of Gisèle Pelicot who sustained years of horrific sexual abuse by her then-husband and other men, has described how she’s certain her father drugged her and strongly suspects she was raped too.

In a wide-ranging interview with the BBC, Darian, aged 46, described the mental “burden” of being the daughter of both victim and perpetrator, as she expressed her strong desire for her father to die in prison.

A horrifying, monthslong mass rape and drugging trial that shook France to its core concluded last month, with 51 guilty verdicts. Dominique Pelicot and 49 others were found guilty of the rape or sexual assault of his former wife, while one of those on trial was convicted of the attempted and aggravated rape of his own wife, rather than Gisèle, having copied Pelicot’s methods.

The trial – which has pushed the country to examine a culture struggling with pervasive misogyny and systemic sexual assault – has galvanized women to demand changes in the way it approaches gender-based violence.

Darian described receiving a fateful phone call from her mother, one evening in November 2020, in which Gisèle informed her that her father, now 72, had been drugging Gisèle for around 10 years in order to facilitate her rape by different men.

“At that moment, I lost what was a normal life,” Darian told the broadcaster.

Darian spoke of how she strongly suspects that she was also a victim of sexual abuse orchestrated by her father. Days after the phone call, Darian herself was called by police and shown images found on Dominique’s laptop of herself lying unconscious on a bed wearing only a T-shirt and underwear – images she didn’t immediately recognize herself in.

She told the BBC she knows her father drugged her, and surmises she was raped too. “But I don’t have any evidence,” she laments.

“And that’s the case for how many victims? They are not believed because there’s no evidence. They’re not listened to, not supported.”

In court, Dominique maintained he had not abused his daughter. Earlier that day, Darian screamed at him: “I’ll never see you again! You’ll die alone like a dog!,” according to media reports.

Now, she describes her father as “one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20 or 30 years” and has written a book detailing her family’s trauma, titled “I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again.”

She described the reality she is faced with as a “terrible burden” and can now only view Dominique as the “sexual criminal he is.”

The book also explores the concept of “chemical submission” – the use of drugs to facilitate criminal action against a person, including sexual abuse. It was the method Dominique used to orchestrate his wife’s abuse, offering her unconscious body to strangers online.

In December, Dominique received the maximum sentence of 20 years for aggravated rape. Forty-eight other men on trial were found guilty of aggravated rape, with two guilty of sexual assault.

Evidence shows how Dominique recruited the men to rape his then-wife on the now-defunct Coco.fr “dating site” for years, using the chatroom called “without her knowledge,” where he would exchange pictures of an unconscious Gisèle before moving to Skype and text messages to arrange the meeting with his accomplices.

Gisèle testified that she was completely unaware of her husband’s actions. Over time, the frequent sedation and sexual abuse began to take a physical toll. Her husband accompanied her on several doctor’s visits during which she complained about memory loss and pelvic pain, according to court documents.

It was only after Dominique was arrested in a local supermarket in September 2020 for filming up the skirts of female customers, for which he was convicted, that his web of crimes came to light. Pelicot received an eight-month suspended prison sentence for this offense.

Whilst investigating the upskirting, police officers confiscated his hard drive, laptop and phones and found hundreds of images and videos of Gisèle being raped, opening one of the worst sex offense cases in modern French history.

Germany is working to secure a drifting Russian oil tanker, believed to be part of Moscow’s “shadow fleet” used to fund its war in Ukraine, after it lost control in the Baltic Sea.

The Eventin tanker, carrying nearly 100,000 tons of oil thought to be from Russia, lost power near the German island of Rügen on Friday, Germany’s Central Command for Maritime Emergencies (CCME) said. By Saturday, three tugboats were still working to tow the 274-meter-long Panamanian-flagged tanker to safety.

The Eventin departed from Russia and was headed for Egypt, according to MarineTraffic, a monitoring group.

CCME said the tugboat convoy was working to tow the Eventin to Sassnitz, a port on Rügen, but that the stormy conditions were “slowing the towing process considerably.”

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said the “decrepit” oil tanker was another example of the danger Russia poses to European security.

Since Western countries sanctioned Russia’s oil exports, the Kremlin has relied on old, sometimes Soviet-era tankers – known as its “shadow fleet” – to transport oil to buyers across the world.

“With the unscrupulous use of a fleet of rusting tankers, (Russian President Vladimir) Putin not only circumvents sanctions but also deliberately accepts the risk of halting tourism in the Baltic Sea region,” Baerbock said Friday.

The Kremlin, which has previously refused to respond to accusations that it uses a “shadow fleet,” has not yet commented on the incident.

The West has grown increasingly alarmed by Russia’s dependence on this aging fleet, which has wreaked environmental havoc in the Black Sea and implicated in damage to vital undersea cables off the Baltic coast.

In December, two Russian tankers were wrecked off the coast of occupied Crimea, spilling thousands of tons of fuel into the Black Sea. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the ships – nearly 50 years old – “shouldn’t have been in operation at all.”

Those two tankers carried around 10,000 tons of fuel between them – 10 times less than the Eventin.

Later in December, Finnish authorities seized a tanker traveling from Russia, on suspicion it had used its anchor to damage an undersea power cable connecting Finland and Estonia.

German authorities said no oil leaks had been detected after the Eventin lost power on Friday, but warned of strong winds and waves of up to 2.5 meters (over 8 feet).

Zelensky called the tanker “an oil bomb that, fortunately, didn’t detonate.”

“Every day, Russia bombards Ukraine, and it finances its missiles, strike drones, and guided bombs, in part, with profits from its tanker fleet. Russia jeopardizes the environment solely to sustain its ability to kill people,” he said Friday.

Also on Friday, the outgoing Biden administration targeted Russia’s energy sector, including its so-called “shadow fleet,” with some of its harshest sanctions to date. Zelensky welcomed the move.

The sanctions target nearly 200 oil-carrying vessels, many thought to be part of the fleet. A senior administration official said: “We expect our actions to cost Russia upwards of billions of dollars per month.”

In December 2022, the Group of Seven (G7) nations capped the price of Russian oil at $60 per barrel. The cap was designed to be enforced by companies that provide shipping, insurance and other services for Russian oil. If a buyer agreed to pay more than the cap, the companies would withhold their services.

To dodge these sanctions, Russia has used aging, often uninsured tankers flagged in countries that do not observe the G7 sanctions.

The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), a Finnish think-tank, said 420 vessels exported Russian crude oil and oil products last month, of which 234 were “shadow tankers,” and 30% of these were at least 20 years old.

Venezuelans once again watched as Nicolás Maduro was sworn into office on Friday, donning the executive sash and declaring himself president despite irregularities and questions around his election.

He repeated his attacks against the United States and any foreign leaders who did not recognize his return to power and vowed to squash all of those who oppose him.

“I come from the people. The power I represent belongs to the people and I owe it to the people,” Maduro told allies and supporters in his inauguration speech.

For many Venezuelans, there will have been a sense of déjà vu as Maduro assumed his third six-year term in office following the contested July 28 election.

The country’s National Electoral Council, the body responsible for supervising and certifying the vote, which is stacked with some of his closest loyalists, had declared Maduro the winner without providing detailed evidence or data to support his victory.

But the opposition disputed the claim, releasing tens of thousands of voting tallies from around the country claiming that their candidate, Edmundo González, had actually won with 67% against Maduro’s 30%.

Several nations, including the United States, have since recognized González as Venezuela’s rightful president-elect and have issued new sanctions against Maduro and some of the country’s electoral authorities.

Fellow opposition leader Maria Corina Machado accused Maduro of a coup d’état in a video posted to social media after he was sworn in for the third time. She said that with his inauguration “they decided to cross the red line” and “they stomp on our constitution.”

“Today, Maduro did not put the presidential band on his chest, he put it on his ankle like a shackle that would tighten more every day,” she added.

A contested comeback

This is not the first time a Maduro victory has been called into question. In fact, every presidential vote in which he’s been a candidate, dating back to when he first took office nearly 12 years ago, has been disputed.

Maduro first became president following the death of his predecessor and mentor Hugo Chavez in March 2013. The larger-than-life populist strongman – who had enshrined himself in power for nearly 15 years as the anti-establishment leader and transformed the country under his socialist-leaning Bolivarian Revolution – had hand-picked Maduro as his successor.

Despite the endorsement, Maduro struggled in the polls and only beat his then-challenger Henrique Capriles by a razor-thin margin of 1.49%. It was considered at the time as one of the closest ballots in decades and the opposition claimed irregularities and fraud in the vote.

Capriles, who had run against Chavez six months earlier and lost by 12%, called for an audit with the National Electoral Council and appealed the results with the Supreme Court. Both bodies were stacked with Chavez and Maduro supporters and the opposition’s claims were discredited.

By the time Maduro’s second presidential election was scheduled to take place, Venezuela had fallen into a deep economic and political crisis. The once oil-rich country was suffering from hyperinflation and widespread economic woes. There were massive food shortages, rampant crime and millions of people had fled the country in fear and desperation.

Many opposition leaders, including Capriles, were banned from running for political office with some arrested or forced into exile due to trumped-up accusations and charges.

Maduro was reelected to his second term in May 2018, in what the opposition and many foreign leaders called a sham election due to the low voter turnout and an opposition boycott following the bans against its candidates. Only 46% of the country’s population participated in the vote, the National Electoral Council said at the time, and Maduro was sworn into office in January 2019.

Massive protests broke out in the streets of the capital Caracas and throughout the country, questioning his legitimacy and calling for him to step down. This was not the first time the country had seen protests, but they were heavily repressed by the Maduro-supporting National Guard, police forces and militia groups and led to several deaths, injuries and arrests.

Global leaders shun Maduro return

As Maduro takes office for the third time, he finds himself more isolated than ever.

His inauguration lacked the usual pomp and pageantry that normally surrounds the event. Cuba and Nicaragua were the only two countries with their presidents in attendance. Meanwhile, the ceremony itself was markedly lowkey in comparison to previous events, held in a small room of the National Assembly rather than the building’s main hall.

Protesters also returned to the streets of Venezuela and the country’s growing diaspora staged marches in Ecuador, Spain and Mexico, among other locations.

Biden administration officials met earlier this week in Washington DC with González, who was recognized by the US as Venezuela’s rightful president-elect.

González, who has been living in exile after being accused of terrorism by the Maduro government, had vowed to return to the country to challenge the inauguration but said the “conditions for his entry” were not met. He posted a video message to his social media accounts from the Dominican Republic, in which he also accused Maduro of staging a coup.

“Maduro has violated the Constitution, and the sovereign will of Venezuelans expressed on July 28,” González said. “He carried out a coup d’état and crowned himself a dictator.”

US President-elect Donald Trump issued a harsh warning against Maduro following reports that Machado had been briefly kidnapped following a protest. The Maduro government denied any involvement.

Shortly after the inauguration, the US announced a $25 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Maduro and his closest officials, including Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello. Washington also announced an 18-month extension of Temporary Protected Status for eligible Venezuelan nationals, which could benefit some 600,000 people living in the US.

Nearly 8 million Venezuelans have left the country over the last decade, the second largest displacement in the world, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

The strongman leader may have succeeded in reclaiming Venezuela’s highest office but with so many – both at home and abroad – still questioning if he stole the election, he could find himself struggling for allies on the world stage.

Two trams collided in Strasbourg in eastern France on Saturday, causing dozens of injuries, though none critical, authorities said.

The accident took place during the afternoon in a tunnel leading to the station near the city’s central train station.

An additional 100 people, though uninjured, were assessed for shock or stress, said René Cellier, director of the Bas-Rhin Fire and Rescue Service.

Emergency services deployed 130 firefighters, 50 rescue vehicles and established a wide safety perimeter.

“Around 50 people are in a state of relative emergency, with injuries such as scalp wounds, clavicle fractures and knee sprains. But there are no critical injuries. It could have been much worse,” Cellier said.

The exact cause of the collision was unclear but local media reported that one of the trams was reversing at the time.

Mayor Jeanne Barseghian, who visited the site, described the incident as a “brutal collision” and expressed her gratitude to emergency responders.

“I am at the station with the injured and rescuers. Thank you for your mobilization,” she said on X. She urged the public not to obstruct rescue operations.

Images shared on social media showed two severely damaged tram cars, one of which had derailed in the tunnel.

Strasbourg, the first major French city to reinstate tram services in 1994, had not experienced a significant tram accident until now, according to French media. Authorities launched an investigation to determine what caused the collision.

Cleanup operations continued Saturday evening, and residents were advised to avoid the area around the train station.

Israel will send the chief of its Mossad intelligence agency to Qatar to continue talks over a potential ceasefire-for-hostages deal in Gaza, in a possible sign the negotiations may be advancing.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Saturday it had directed the chief of the Mossad, David Barnea, to head a delegation “to depart for Doha to continue advancing a deal for the release of our hostages.”

It did not say when Barnea and his delegation will arrive in Qatar.

The delegation will also include Nitzan Alon, the head of the Israel Defense Forces’ hostage’s unit and Ronen Bar, the head of Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency.

Netanyahu’s decision came on the heels of a meeting with US “negotiators of both the incoming and outgoing administrations,” his office added.

Netanyahu met Saturday with Steve Witkoff, US president-elect Donald Trump’s designated envoy to the Middle East.

Despite talks appearing deadlocked, with Hamas claiming that Israel has introduced new conditions and Egyptian mediators sounding downbeat about progress, Netanyahu’s decision could be a sign that talks are advancing.

Indirect talks between Israel and Hamas have carried on even as official negotiations have been deadlocked for months, with the outgoing administration of US President Joe Biden pushing for a deal.

This is a developing story. More to come.

A former child star from Australia died when the Los Angeles wildfires ripped through his family’s Malibu estate in California earlier this week, according to his mother.

Rory Callum Sykes was at the family’s 17-acre Mount Malibu TV Studios estate, where he had his own cottage, when it burned down on January 8, his mother Shelley Sykes wrote on X Thursday.

Shelley Sykes described her son, who appeared on the 1998 British TV series “Kiddy Kapers,” as “beautiful” and “wonderful” and said she was “totally heart broken” by his death.

She said she had tried to put out the wildfire cinders on her property’s roof using a hose but couldn’t because the water wasn’t working.

“He said, ‘mom leave me’ and no mom can leave their kid. And I’ve got a broken arm, I couldn’t lift him, I couldn’t move him,” Sykes told Australia’s 10 News First.

Her son, 32, was born blind with cerebral palsy on July 29, 1992, and had become famous for his speeches on overcoming disability. He was the co-founder of Happy Charity, which according to its site offers, “Hope, Happiness & Health to those that are Hurting.”

“He overcame so much with surgeries and therapies to regain his sight and to be able to learn to walk. Despite the pain, he still enthused about traveling the world with me from Africa to Antarctica,” Shelley Sykes wrote on X.

She said her son was born in Britain but lived in Australia, then America. He was “a gift born on mine and his grandma’s birthday,” she wrote.

On his website, Sykes describes himself as a professional speaker and consultant for many companies including the Tony Robbins Foundation, and the Cerebral Palsy Alliance.

In an appearance with his mother on Australian television show “Mornings with Kerri-Anne” in 2003, he discussed going on a trip to the United States to speak at a Tony Robbins motivational conference.

“It doesn’t matter what happens to you in life, it’s what you do about it that counts,” he told viewers.

“The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is providing consular assistance to his family. Our thoughts are with them,” DFAT told 9News. “Owing to our privacy obligations we are unable to provide further comment.”

Ukraine claimed Saturday to have struck one of Russia’s largest oil refineries in a drone attack, starting a fire at the facility more than 700 miles into Russian territory.

The attack on the Taneco refinery in the city of Nizhnekamsk, Tatarstan – one of the largest and most modern refineries in Russia – was the second time the facility had been struck by Ukrainian forces within the space of a year, according to Lieutenant Andrii Kovalenko, the head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation.

Despite the footage, the press service of the Republic of Tatarstan denied there had been a fire at the plant, insisting instead that it had been carrying out a mock evacuation as a safety exercise and that the images of the glowing facility in fact showed “the work of the plant’s torches.”

The Taneco refinery has a refining capacity of over 16 million tons of oil per year and “plays a key role in supplying fuel to the Russian army,” according to the Ukrainian official Kovalenko.

“The destruction of refineries and oil depots directly affects Russia’s ability to wage an intense war,” he added.

Kovalenko said the refinery had also been hit in the spring of 2024, in an attack that damaged its primary processing unit.

The attack last April was at the time the farthest into Russian territory Ukraine had struck since the beginning of the war.

When 35-year-old combat medic Tetyana Tsymbaliuk regained consciousness in the hospital room, she found her boyfriend waiting with a bunch of flowers. He proposed, but she declined. After a serious injury, her leg had been amputated; she worried about being a burden as a wife.

“I realized that before amputation, I was more attractive. I was not sure that I could find a way to fulfil my family role as a woman,” said Tsymbaliuk. It took her a long time to regain her confidence.

Tsymbaliuk says she was one of the first Ukrainian military amputees following the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022. Almost three years on, nearly 370,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been wounded. Thousands have lost one or more limbs.

While the government does not provide official figures on amputations, a state program issued prostheses to almost 20,000 people across 2023 and the first half of 2024, and many others were helped by private programs in Ukraine and abroad.

In the past two years, Ukraine has implemented protocols for physical and, to some degree, psychological rehabilitation for those injured in conflict. But sexual rehabilitation for people who have lost limbs or suffered other serious injuries has been largely overlooked.

Sex has long been a taboo topic in Ukraine. While modern Ukrainians are more open about sex than in the Soviet era, the topic is still an uncomfortable one for many.

“If I ask veterans about sex issues, they usually say that everything is okay. Only a few of them after a while, when they start to trust me, can talk about the problems they have,” Revunets said.

There are no protocols or recommendations for sexual rehabilitation on the official governmental level, she said, or even any mention of it.

“That’s important because the doctor is required to work according to protocol,” Revunets said. “Sexual rehabilitation is not specified anywhere, so the doctor can only take the initiative if he or she wants to do so. But most doctors aren’t ready to talk about it.”

It takes time even to persuade some doctors of its significance, Revunets said. “When I tell my colleagues about the importance of sexual rehabilitation, they look at me as if I’m crazy, (someone) who doesn’t understand what kind of serious injuries the patient has,” she said.

A good sexologist can help in many ways. Revunets is one of the very few sexologists in the country who works with the military. “I find out what exactly is wrong with the patient. I ask how the person feels. Depending on this, I give advice – it can be advice on how and what to do from a technical point of view, or what medications to take, or help psychologically.”

‘I was told to have sex, but no one told me how’

The war has resulted in an unprecedented number of people with injuries, a situation for which Ukraine was unprepared. The lack of any information on sexual rehabilitation has motivated the Ukrainian nonprofit Veteran Hub, which is specifically dedicated to supporting war veterans and their families, to study the topic.

In 2023, Veteran Hub researchers conducted 39 in-depth interviews with injured soldiers and their partners. Among other things, interviewees spoke anonymously about their sex lives after injury.

Researchers found that sex itself had changed for many. For example, after being injured, some respondents started to prepare for or plan sexual relations due to physical changes.

One of the veterans in a long-term relationship said of the doctors who treated him: “I was told to have sex, but no one told me how. If we’re talking about the technical part, it is very important.” He told researchers that without formal resources available to them, men were having to pass on information “by word of mouth.”

In response to the researchers’ findings, Veteran Hub created a guide for veterans on how to restore their sexual lives after being wounded.

“We saw that there was a great demand for this topic. After physical rehabilitation, people start asking themselves whether they will be able to swim in the sea, go skiing, go on dates, or have sex. And usually no one can answer these questions,” said Veteran Hub project manager Kateryna Skorohod.

Olga Serdyuk, the head of a sexual educational program at a network of rehabilitation centers called Recovery, said: “We need to understand that a wounded person works with different specialists – surgeons, physiotherapists, psychologists – on the way to rehabilitation. Because there is a lack of sexologists in Ukraine, those doctors must be ready for the person to open up to them and talk about sexual rehabilitation.”

To help widen their knowledge, Recovery launched a course called “Sexual Life” to train doctors and other professionals working with Ukrainian soldiers.

Serious injury changes the life of not only the veteran but also their partner, Serdyuk explained.

“For some reason, Ukrainian society believes that a good wife should take care of her husband on her own, even if there is an opportunity to get help. A woman becomes a carer. What kind of sex can we talk about then?” Serdyuk said, referring to how the pressures of full-time caring can lessen a couple’s capacity to explore paths to sexual fulfilment.

“Even if we are talking about complete dysfunction or missing genitals, a person (who’s been injured) can still have an orgasm with pleasure. You have to work with your fantasies, study your body.”

People need to learn to accept themselves in a new way, and believe in their integrity, their body, Serdyuk said.

Ukrainian ‘Bachelor’ stars double amputee

Discussions surrounding disabilities are increasingly cropping up in Ukraine as casualties rise.

Popular dating show “The Bachelor” has taken the discussion into the mainstream, with 26-year-old Ukrainian veteran Oleksandr Budko – who lost both his legs in the war – cast as the star of the latest season.

An episode with an intimate scene, shown in November, became one of the most popular in the season. According to data provided by Starlight Media, a Ukrainian broadcasting group, about 2.8 million people all around the country watched it, making it the most viewed program on the day it aired.

“We were concerned about how people would react to seeing a person’s body with visible amputations in such an intimate context. There is no representation of people living with injuries in Ukraine and we didn’t know how people would react to it. It was a big challenge. But it turned out well.”

Kalyna thinks the audience was interested, in part, because they realize that in this time of war their own loved ones could be injured at any moment.

On his Instagram page, Budko said he was not taking part in the show to convince anyone of anything or prove his “normality.”

“My prostheses or even sometimes a wheelchair are just a part of me, but not what defines me,” he posted. “The fact that I have a disability does not make me less worthy of love or a happy life. And this is important to understand.”

Budko also posted that his first experience of sex after injury “was not just sex, but a step back to life.”

Choosing life over suffering

Among those to attend Recovery’s “Sexual Life” course is Oleksandr Batalov. The unit infantry commander, who works as an osteopath in civil life, lost his leg in a fierce battle on the front line. He recalls that it took time for him to get used to his changed body.

“At the beginning, with such trauma, you want no one to look at you. But my wife gave me huge support. So, I got a grip. I chose life, not suffering,” he said. The psychologist helped a lot, he added.

There are very few sexologists in the hospitals, he said, but men who have experienced serious injuries are talking about sex with one another, and that’s important. However, “they need to have specialists they can talk to” as well, Batalov said.

That’s why he is starting this course. “If you survived, you have to live. Despite the injury, my life is full and interesting, I want to leave and study and share the knowledge,” said Batalov, who is now working again as an osteopath.

The same goes for Tsymbaliuk, the injured combat medic. She decided to live a fulfilling life no matter what. Her boyfriend did not give up and proposed again.

After months of rehabilitation in Germany, and later in Ukraine’s Superhumans Center, she finally married him, realizing “she was full of love that she wanted to fulfil.” Four months ago, they welcomed their first child together.

“I’m not hiding my prosthetic. I’m living a full life. And I’m happy,” she said.