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Olga Rudnieva, CEO of the Superhumans Centre, a large new facility dedicated to prosthetics, rehabilitation and reconstruction that opened last week near Lviv, said the government currently offers help to amputees to the amount of 2.2 million hryvnia (48,000) for soldiers and 5,000 hryvnia for civilians.

However, this is not enough to cover the needs of people with complicated cases, such as those with amputations above the knee or elbow. These require much more complex and expensive prosthetics and thats where non-governmental help must step in.

The Superhumans Centre hopes to help 3,000 people for free by the end of the year. It has support from big donors from the UK and US, including the Warren Buffett Foundation.

However, one challenge facing these types of clinics is that some amputations are done incorrectly due to the difficult circumstances of war. The airways over Ukraine are closed making air evacuation difficult, so it can take hours or days to evacuate someone to medical help. This can lead to a need for further operations and amputations.

Russians shell our evacuation cars so it can take days to get people who are injured to help, Rudnieva said. We have a soldier with a triple amputation he was carried to safety by his comrades for 2.5 hours. Another guy who lost hand had to walk for an hour to get assistance because his units medic was killed.

We need to teach Ukraine to fish

Another problem is that people need more than one prosthetic. A child amputee will need as many as 35 over a lifetime as they grow, and different limbs are needed for different applications, such as for sports or on the battlefield. Someone who works with intricate tasks might need a bionic arm, but they are fragile and sensitive to water so cant be worn all the time.

Yet just as WW2 drove the advance of antibiotics and the use of metal plates to heal broken bones, Rudnieva believes the break in the clouds of Ukraines war is that it will drive innovation. The country already has a wealth of programmers and tech specialists to draw from.

One new start-up that is launching this month is Allbionics, a Ukrainian-Polish company that is hoping to provide 150 bionic arms to people by the end of the year. They have developed a method that allows arms to be fitted and made using 3D scanning and printing, which should dramatically cut wait times.

Part of their strategy is to retrain civilians who have lost limbs, many of whom work in manual labour, in IT, and other new industries. They are now looking for international investment to help them provide the arms, which cost up to $10,000, for free.

Maybe our first round of prosthetics will have flaws, but the next will be better and the one after that even better, said founder Volodymyr Bandura. Its a classic situation, either you teach a person to fish or you give them a fish. We need to teach Ukraine to fish.

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