After his discharge from the army, Vladyslav Romanetskiy’s life was a daze.
“You sleep maybe two or three hours a day, and you feel awful all the time,” he says. “The closest comparison I can give is this: imagine going to your mother’s funeral with the worst hangover of your life — and feeling like that every single day.”
Then Vladyslav discovered medieval combat.
A native of Kryvyi Rih, the birthplace of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Vladyslav joined the Ukrainian army in 2017. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, he served as a combat medic on the frontlines of Kherson, Donetsk and Kharkiv.
He was discharged after suffering multiple concussions in an artillery strike.
That’s when new problems started: hearing loss, worsening eyesight, uncontrollable tremors. The sights and sounds of everyday life triggered sudden bouts of panic.
“A friend and I were standing outside talking when someone nearby was taking photos with a flash,” Vladyslav says. “And both of us almost dropped to the ground because our brains instantly associated it with an explosion.”
Vladyslav was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
During a stint in an inpatient rehabilitation center, a specialist told him about a local veterans-run project called Buhurt Sich, an organization that uses a medieval combat sport called buhurt to help veterans dealing with stress-related disorders.
The sport uses medieval fighting tools like body armor and blunted “swords” in martial-arts styled fights.
“I put on soft armor and tried fighting with a sword,” he says. “It felt amazing and very unusual.”
Vladyslav was hooked.
“Vlad watched every single video our coach had posted while he was sitting in a hospital ward,” says Olena Krechet, the head of Buhurt Sich. “He studied all his techniques. Then he came to training and beat the coach, a world champion in medieval combat, by the way, using the coach’s own moves.”
Krechet says people who suffer from PTSD frequently have excess adrenaline preventing them from even being able to do routine things like eat and sleep.
But, she says, “When you step into the arena, you naturally release that adrenaline.”
Vladyslav is now an instructor at Buhurt Sich.
“A lot of times, you come to training feeling bad or just not in the mood, but the guys somehow start this wave of energy, and you begin to recharge from them,” says Vladyslav. “There’s this exchange of energy, and it really powers both sides. Plenty of times, I leave practice thinking, ‘Damn … honestly, they probably helped me more than I helped them.'”
Watch the episode from the five-part series “Forged by War,” co-produced by Independence Avenue Media and 1+1 Production, below.
