Sitting in a small plane weaving between B.C.’s Purcell Mountains, Ukrainian veteran Ivan Maruniak said he felt joy for the first time in two years.
“This is the place where you don’t feel danger, and you don’t expect danger,” he said through a translator.
Mr. Maruniak was one of a half-dozen Ukrainian veterans and combat medics invited by former war correspondent Julius Strauss to a remote location in the B.C. Interior for some peace of mind. Despite being strangers beforehand, they had a commonality in their experiences of war and lasting trauma.
For 10 days in June, the group gathered at Wild Bear Lodge to learn new outdoor skills, spend time in nature and share some long-awaited respite far from the dangers of combat.
Mr. Strauss, owner of the lodge near the Selkirk Mountains, moved to Canada after 15 years of covering conflict in places such as Ukraine, Russia, the Middle East and the Balkans for The Daily Telegraph. He also worked at The Globe and Mail for a short time after arriving in the country. He launched the Wild Bear Vets program in 2021 with a group of Canadian and British veterans to promote the benefits of nature-based rehabilitation in the same woods where he, himself, chose to retreat from the atrocities of war. For the program’s second iteration, he turned his attention to Ukraine.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, 2022, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have been wounded or killed. To seek some form of therapy, Mr. Strauss said many of them have been venturing into the Carpathian Mountains in western Ukraine to hike, raft and connect with other veterans. As an experienced animal tracker, rafting guide and conservationist, he saw an opportunity to help from home.
Hoping to augment Ukrainian rehabilitation initiatives and spark new ones, Mr. Strauss originally planned to run the second round of the program in 2023 with 12 participants. However, after a complicated visa process, changes to Ukraine’s military draft, injuries and the death of a combat medic a few weeks before she was supposed to depart, only half made the trip a year later.
While it’s not the right path for everyone, Mr. Strauss said that for those who are open to it, the skills-based retreat can help veterans in a precarious mental or physical state see how they can still contribute to society.
“A lot of the veterans say to us, ‘Look, when the war is over, we want to concentrate on these things, but right now, we’re fighting for our very existence.’ And I totally get that line of argument. The problem is that for people who have been invalided out already, they can’t wait till the end of the war,” he said.
Mr. Maruniak, who retired from the military because of a disability, served between March and November of 2022 as a gunner in an artillery unit. He said he applied to the program because his psychologist recommended it, and he had set goals to achieve.
“First of all, I needed to recover myself, to recover my mental health, because I have a disability connected to mental health issues. The second is, I wanted to learn the experience of rehabilitation of veterans in the wild nature,” he said.
Now, Mr. Maruniak is trained in search and rescue, driving an ATV, fishing, trip planning and swift water rescues. Armed with this knowledge and newfound friendships, he plans to establish his own retreat in Ukraine near the Carpathian Mountains and Dniester Canyon, where injured veterans will be able to find the kind of solace he experienced in B.C.
“They can forget about work for the moment and just live their life and enjoy their life,” he said.
Natalia Salimova is the founder of Mountain Therapy, an outdoor rehabilitation program which takes veterans into the Ukrainian countryside to hike, raft and bicycle.
For advice, he will reach out to Natalia Salimova, a volunteer in the war and fellow participant in the Wild Bear Vets program. She has run her own outdoor rehabilitation program for veterans in Ukraine since 2015 and applied to attend Mr. Strauss’s to improve upon her own work.
Ms. Salimova said there aren’t enough programs like hers or Mr. Strauss’s in Ukraine that work on the principle of veteran-to-veteran support.
“This project, they are not for tourists because participants are different, and we should understand and consider their physical and mental state,” she said through a translator.
At home, Ms. Salimova said 15 volunteers, largely veterans or their family members, run her organization. When she’s not guiding trips into the mountains, she also works for the charitable foundation Stabilization Support Services, which helps displaced people in Ukraine.
Despite the long trip to B.C. and time spent acclimatizing on each end of it, Ms. Salimova said it was worth it to have some time away in a place where she felt safe.
“I’m fond of mountains, and I really love to be in nature with minimum people around me, with no explosions and air strike sirens like we have it in Ukraine,” she said.
British veteran Andy Burns said he was a mentor for the participants of this year’s program after being a beneficiary of the inaugural Wild Bear Vets. He said one adventure in particular, to a local hot spring, showed him just how useful the time spent in nature was for the Ukrainian cohort.
“They weren’t getting shelled. They were completely relaxed. They’ve been in the environment for a number of days, and they were smiling, and they were happy, and they were content for that, for that one moment right there. And that’s what this does. It transcends hundreds or thousands of hours of therapy,” he said.
Oleksandr Budko meditates on the grass next to the Lardeau River.