From the reading room to the front line and back to the saddle

I am a radiologist with almost twenty years of practice, specialising in magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography. For more than ten years my home has been Odesa. You may have read here about what happened to the Innova Diagnostica clinic in our city. I will only add that Odesa is still standing, still working, still moving. Reports get signed, scanners keep running, and on the mornings after a strike people go to work anyway. That is not heroism; it is simply how life is lived here now.

Finding my footing after the front line

In February 2022, when the full-scale invasion began, I put my career on hold and joined a newly formed unit of the Special Operations Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. For the first six months I served as a group commander. Those were the months of the first shock, when nobody yet knew whether the country would hold. When it became clear that it would, and that Russia was not as invincible as it had first seemed, we could finally organise ourselves properly. 

I was the only person in the unit with a medical degree and an officer's rank, so I became head of its medical service and spent the rest of my time in uniform building it from nothing: recruiting and training combat medics and paramedics, appointing heads of the medical posts, setting up evacuation routes and coordinating the chain of casualty evacuation from the front line.

I was discharged on medical grounds in 2024. I expected that the hard part was over. It was not. Coming back to civilian life while the war continues turned out to be its own long piece of work, and it took me the better part of a year to find my footing again as a doctor, a colleague and a person.

Back on the bike, alongside fellow veterans

Cycling has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I rode a great deal and I rode far; in 2021 I was planning a solo ride across Europe from Nordkapp to Sicily. The war ended that plan, and for about a year and a half after leaving the army I did not get on a bicycle at all. There was simply no energy left for it, physical or emotional. 

Only this year did I feel the joy of a long ride come back. Around the same time I met, quite by chance, the team at CyclePoint, an independent bicycle hub in Kyiv, and they invited me to join their next expedition.

So, from 28 September to 10 October, a small team of Ukrainian veterans will ride more than a thousand kilometres from Lviv through Lublin, Warsaw, Wrocław, Wałbrzych to Berlin. Two of my teammates are riding on prostheses after combat amputations; one of them lost a leg and an arm in November 2024. 

Riding for evacuation and connection

Earlier this year the same collective rode two thousand kilometres from Ukraine to the Netherlands and raised enough to fund an evacuation vehicle for front-line defenders. This time our goal is 800,000 hryvnias, roughly 14,500 euros, for another evacuation vehicle for our friends in the SIGNUM unit. As someone who spent two years organising casualty evacuation, I know exactly what a vehicle like this means in the first hour after a wound.

But the money is only part of it. We want to meet the cycling communities of Europe along the way, ride with them, talk with them, and show them something the news tickers cannot: that the men who defended democracy's eastern flank are back home, unbroken, and pedalling forward into civilian life. And that Ukraine is not only a place where things are destroyed. It is also a place where a radiologist can put down his dictation microphone, go to war, come back, and find his way onto a bicycle again.

If you are a radiologist, or a cyclist, or both, and our route passes near you, come and ride a stretch with us. We would be glad of the company.

Oleksandr Berezovskyi is a consultant radiologist in Odesa, Ukraine, cofounder of RadVoice, a Ukrainian-language voice dictation and structured reporting tool for radiology, and a veteran of the Special Operations Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (2022 - 2024).