Why aren’t we giving Ukraine what it needs?

When you visit the rehabilitation centres for those Ukrainian soldiers who have received life-changing injuries, you swiftly learn how to deal with the shock of what you see. You don’t flinch or look away; of course not.

You learn the habit of the skilled doctors and nurses and physiotherapists – of concentrating not on the wounds but on the individuals, on the men; and though many women have been killed or injured in this beastly conflict, I must have seen over a hundred badly injured soldiers in Kyiv and Lviv, in three different hospitals, and they all were men.

You notice some remarkable qualities in these patients. They are not by any means all young, far from it. Some are in their forties and fifties. They are a citizen army: husbands, fathers, greybeards – men of my age. As you watch them trying to recover strength in the limbs that remain, kneading plasticine, throwing medicine balls, struggling again and again to perform some rudimentary task, you feel their determination to make the best possible use of the exemplary care they are getting: to rebuild something like a life.

As you talk to them, you rapidly discover that they don’t want to excite your compassion. They don’t want to be told how brave they are – because they don’t feel that they are especially brave. As a couple of them put it to me, rather fiercely, they think they were ‘doing their job’. They were doing something that was simply essential, and unavoidable, for their families and for the life of their country, and they had bad luck – as anyone can have bad luck in a dangerous job.

They got hit by shrapnel from a tank round or an artillery shell, or they trod on a mine, and they sustained injuries that would have been completely familiar to the battlefield medics of the first world war; the difference being that today, a century on, the extraordinary advances in surgery and prosthetics mean that not only are they alive, but they want one thing above all else.