At the near end of the pool hangs a banner depicting a soldier, standing in a field of golden corn underneath a rich blue sky. A column of tanks stretches behind him and overhead flies a national flag that the scene’s essential elements are designed to replicate. “I believe in the armed forces, glory to Ukraine!” reads the accompanying slogan. Beneath it, as the image catches the early morning light, Mykhailo Serbin climbs in and sets off down the middle lane.
Serbin cuts through the water with speed and grace, which is to be expected from one of the best para swimmers on Earth. At the end of each length he is guided by sticks held out by members of staff, so that he knows when it is time to turn. His local pool in Kharkiv was ruined by Russian bombs; it has been an adjustment to live and train here in Kamianske, a dormitory city of Dnipro, along with a tranche of athletes living in forced exile from their homes.
“We had no hopes, no expectations,” Serbin says of those months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. “Would we get a salary? Would our fees be paid? It was all unknown. We lived one day at a time and just started training. You couldn’t know what would happen tomorrow.”
Through all the uncertainty and upheaval he will compete in Paris over the next fortnight. He hopes to retain his Paralympic title in the 100m backstroke S11 category, which is for swimmers who are almost completely blind, and has a 200m individual medley silver to build on too. At 20 he has a formidable bank of achievements behind him, a world championship gold in Madeira last year among the most recent.
“The first goal is to prove to yourself that you haven’t worked in vain for the last few years,” he says of the task ahead. “The next is to make sure people don’t forget about Ukrainians, who are such strong people.”
It is remarkable that Serbin and his teammates, a number of whom join him to discuss Ukraine’s buildup to the Paralympics, have made it this far. The fog of uncertainty that clouded para sport in the country two and a half years ago was severe: budgets were initially slashed as state funding was diverted to the army and a formidable machine struggled to stay afloat. Ukraine finished fifth in the charts at Tokyo 2020 with 95 medals, including Serbin’s two. This is one of the world’s best para sport setups but it has had to stretch its resources to the limit in order to make it to Paris this summer.
Anton Kol, a four-time Paralympics backstroke medallist in the S1 category for athletes with minimal use of their arms or legs, speaks matter-of-factly of the missile that fell 60 metres from his house on the outskirts of Dnipro. It was 2 April this year and he was walking in the front yard with his young son. “The windows were blown out,” he explains. Around the corner a swimming pool where Kol would train daily was damaged: a visit to the site later that day finds it fully functional again, children attending an after-school lesson, but with clear damage to the facility’s exterior and a sizeable crater across the road.
Nobody could be inscrutable in the face of such a close call. But Kol, at 34 a locally-born national treasure who was abandoned by his mother at birth and grew up in an orphanage, was competing at the European championships in Madeira less than three weeks later and winning gold in the 100m. “We’ve had to adapt to the conditions,” he says. “When missiles have hit residential areas the people have been so united. This city is always blooming.”
Kol has enjoyed a successful parallel career designing houses, although he says his efforts outside sport nowadays are devoted to social initiatives and looking after his family. He has overcome colossal obstacles to get here, citing sport as a means of overcoming depression when he was younger and becoming one of the lucky ones while others with his disability fell through society’s cracks. War is one more challenge to face. “All of us has had their own path,” he says of Ukraine’s Paralympic team. “But the strength of our spirit is great.”
Another of Ukraine’s swimmers is Andrii Trusov, who counts five medals in Tokyo among more than 30 major career honours. He has also set six world records. The 24-year-old was born near Sloviansk, a city in Donetsk Oblast that was an early frontier when Russia first invaded the region in 2014. He has cerebral palsy and was 11 when a chance conversation at home changed his life.
“We were having some repairs done at the apartment and my parents hired a woman to put up wallpaper,” he says. “It turned out she was working in parallel at the pool in Sloviansk as an administrator. She found out that I have health problems and said that children in similar situations were able to train there, and Paralympic athletes were also coached. My mum called them literally the next day and we went along, for a kind of trial. They looked at me and said 11 was too old to become an athlete. But then they said that, if I really had the desire, we could try. It turned out the desire was very strong.”
The rest is history. The fact that Trusov continues to live and train in Kamianske, which is the de facto base for Paralympic swimmers from territories occupied by Russia or those under severest threat, is very much in the present. Alongside him at the Invasport club back in Dnipro, where all of the athletes interviewed by the Guardian are members, sits another swimmer from Donetsk Oblast in Veronika Korzhova, a 16-year-old who lost both legs as a child. Korzhova left for Kamianske in April 2022, with the situation in her home region becoming untenable. Horrifyingly Soledar, where she grew up, has now been all but destroyed. “That was the hardest moment,” she says. “Moving city and coming here to train with new coaches and a new team.”
Displaced athletes like Kol, Trusov and Korzhova are given state-funded accommodation in a hotel close to the pool, which sits in one of Kamianske’s tree-lined Soviet-era suburbs. Their families also rent apartments in the area. “I think this has brought everyone closer together,” says Korzhova, who will make her Paralympic debut in Paris. “We have such a strong sense of mutual assistance.”
There has been a dream to keep alive. “I watched Tokyo and had such a desire within me to reach my first Paralympics this year,” Korzhova says. What an astounding achievement it is, for all the troubles in her young life, that she has made it.
In 2023, a large amount of Ukrainian para sport’s budget was restored while funds were also sought from foreign sponsors. But the country has still needed to be discerning about which athletes it can back fully and which competitions it can enter. In the early stages some Paralympians were at least part-funding their own presence at training camps. Now a parlous state of affairs has at least some stability and the task is to show that even the daily sadness of Russia’s war cannot tarnish a jewel in the country’s sporting crown.
“We’re going to show the importance of Ukraine, and we’re going there to win,” Kol says. Trusov recognises that the act of winning can have dual significance. “Every time our athletes climb onto the podium and the anthem sounds, we remind people,” he says. “My personal goal is to show people we are still here and can maintain a decent international level.”
Back in the pool, Serbin completes his first training session of the day. There will be another later. At 20 he knows the level of dedication required even though his coach, watching from the side, proudly notes that he is also a talented singer and musician. His worst fears of 2022, employment-wise at least, have not been realised. “Now we can be sure that we have a place to work, we’ll be paid for it and we won’t be left on our own,” he says. The Paralympics will be a potent display of Ukraine’s togetherness.