Triumph Within Tragedy: A Testimony to the Paralympics and the Ukrainian Spirit

It is 4:35 a.m. on March 7, 2026, and I am in the midst of an unusually busy trauma shift in Milwaukee, Wisconsin when my phone buzzes. I open an excited message from my friend Dan Cnossen, writing from the Paralympic Games in Italy: “Gold medals today for Ukraine in the biathlon!” I had hoped to be there with Dan for his last Games, but my clinical duties could not accommodate the trip. But at least he was giving me the play-by-play from afar. 

Accompanying his text were triumphant photos of Valeriy Sushkevich, president of the Ukrainian Paralympic Committee, and teammates Taras Rad, Vasyl Kravchuk, Oleksandra Konova, Liudmyla Liashenko, and Anatoly Zhumik – athletes whose names many Ukrainians will recognize, but whose courage the US and the wider world are only beginning to understand. I have come to know many of them well and consider them dear friends – a bond that traces back to another Winter Games, Beijing in 2022, and the first dark days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

My wife is Ukrainian and we are both physicians in Wisconsin. We met as MD/PhD students at Yale in 1998, five years after she first arrived in the US as one of newly independent Ukraine’s first high school exchange students. The past four years of our lives have been dominated by this war – twelve years, if I am being honest, going back to the seizure of Crimea during the Sochi Paralympics in 2014. 

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, we retooled our lives entirely around support for Ukraine. We have lost countless loved ones in the years since. Yet through all of it, the one silver lining has been the remarkable people we have come to know and call friends in the midst of horror and atrocity. Bearing witness and experiencing firsthand the Ukrainian spirit and the extraordinary strength and resilience of its people has been our one grace: a gift of triumph within tragedy.

I have visited Ukraine on humanitarian trips close to 20 times since 2022. I am not a war doctor, but the sheer scale of carnage has been humbling to even the most seasoned American military physicians I have traveled with. I have stood at mass grave sites and hospitals purposefully targeted in violation of international law. I have ducked down side streets in Lviv, Kyiv and Zhytomyr as sirens screamed and missiles and drones flew overhead. I have watched makeshift triage teams pull bodies from drone-struck buildings in Dnipro. 

The gruesome casualties I have seen near the front haunt me, as does the long aftermath for those who survive and must rebuild their lives at hospitals and rehabilitation centers in the rear. I have watched Mars Field at Lychakiv Cemetery in Lviv grow from perhaps a hundred graves when my wife’s 25-year-old cousin was buried there in the summer of 2023 to thousands. Dan Cnossen witnessed many of these things alongside me and would agree: it changes you. There is no other way to say it.

Indomitable spirit

Through it all, the Ukrainian people persevere. One of those people, whom I first met through Dan and the Paralympics, is Valeriy Sushkevich – a remarkable individual whom many will recognize, including many Americans who have encountered him in outlets such as the New York Times. But Ukrainians need no introduction. 

Like Dan, Valeriy’s story is a triumph within tragedy that could stand alone. He lost the use of his legs to polio as a toddler, grew up in a Soviet culture that tried to pretend people like him did not exist, and went on to become a Soviet Paralympic champion, then President of the Ukrainian Paralympic Committee, and a long-serving member of the Verkhovna Rada. He has advocated for people with disabilities his entire life and believes deeply in the healing power of sport.

Like all Ukrainians, he is also not one to be bullied. In the early days after Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014, Valeriy was with the Ukrainian Paralympic team in Sochi when he was summoned and personally beseeched to bend the knee. He refused. Defiant, steadfast, unbowed on the territory of the dictator who would spend the next decade trying to erase his country from the map. That is my friend Valeriy. That is the Ukrainian spirit.

Dan Cnossen is similarly heroic. He lost both legs above the knee to an improvised explosive device (IED) in Afghanistan while serving as a US Navy SEAL commander and went on to become one of the most decorated American Winter Paralympians of his generation. He and Valeriy found each other through sport and through a shared understanding of what the body can endure and what it can rebuild. 

The Paralympic movement was born after World War II for precisely this purpose: to rehabilitate soldiers with spinal cord injuries through athletic competition. Ukraine will need that medicine more than most nations in living memory, and it has become a new calling for me. With Dan, I have climbed mountains alongside Ukrainian amputees and gold star families in the Austrian Alps with Mountain Seed Foundation, a journey documented by Scott Pelley for 60 Minutes and by filmmaker Max Lowe in Camp Courage on Netflix. 

With Valeriy, Dan and others across Ukraine, we have paired sport with mental health programs, and nowhere to greater effect than the Ukrainian Paralympic Center in the Carpathians – a place that feels like magic to me every time I walk through its doors.

Wounded warriors and a sporting connection

It was there that Dan met Anatoly Zhumik in spring 2024. Anatoly is a young veteran from a small village north of Lviv who volunteered to fight at 18, served as a sniper, and was paralyzed by a spinal cord injury in the fall of 2023 near where my wife’s cousin was killed and just weeks after. When I had visited the Center in the winter of 2023 with medical colleagues, Anatoly had just arrived from the hospital to begin rehab. By the time Dan and I returned, he had made extraordinary strides and was training alongside Paralympic athletes, aiming to join the team himself.

But Anatoly’s obstacles were not only physical. His father and two brothers remained on the front lines, his father now missing in action. The soldier who rescued him had been killed. He had recently lost one of his closest friends near Chasiv Yar. Yet his competitive fire burned undimmed. 

The connection between Dan and Anatoly was immediate and profound: two wounded warriors who found their way back through sport, separated by two to three decades and an ocean, but bound by the same hard knowledge of what it costs and what it can restore. Before we left, Dan promised to meet Anatoly in Italy if he made the team.

Dan has fulfilled that promise many times over, linking up with and racing against Anatoly at competitions across Europe over the past two years. And now he’s meeting up again with him and Valeriy in Italy. In four years of working alongside veterans and crisis-affected communities in Ukraine, I have lost count of the moments where truth has written something more powerful than anything fiction could devise. This is one of them.

These Winter Paralympics carry mixed feelings for me. Sochi and Beijing are bound in memory to invasion, Crimea and Ukraine at large, respectively. And these Games mark the first Winter Paralympics in which Russian athletes have been authorized to compete since Sochi – a decision that deserves far more scrutiny than it has received, but which the joy of Ukrainian gold makes harder to dwell on today. 

My friend Dan competes in the final Paralympic biathlon race of his storied career this Sunday, March 15, and I will be cheering him on from afar. Secretly, though, I will be rooting for the Ukrainians. I am American and I bleed red, white and blue like the stars and stripes, but my heart also beats blue and gold. So, I know Dan won’t mind. He has seen what I have seen. He has lived through what countless Ukrainian heroes have endured. He has witnessed their spirit, their strength, their refusal to yield. 

Besides, we always joke that the great American Superhero Paralympian otherwise known as Dan Cnossen does not lose often, but when he does, it is almost always to a Ukrainian. One of my all-time favorite photographs is of Dan on the medal stand in Seoul: Taras Rad grinning with the gold, Dan holding the silver and a stuffed teddy bear behind him. Poetic.

Ukraine has already won the hardest competition of all – the fight to remain. As in the Paralympics, Ukraine will triumph over the tragedy of the Russian Bear.

The views expressed are the author’s and not necessarily of Kyiv Post.

Based in Wisconsin, Douglas J. Davis is a neuroradiologist and emergency radiologist. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he has embraced a full-time role as a medical humanitarian and advocate with an interest in global health, propelled by a profound personal connection to Ukraine

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