GOWANDA, N.Y. (WKBW) — For over a year, a Gowanda man has been serving on the front lines of Ukraine as the country continues to fend off Russian forces. And even after sustaining multiple injuries in battle, he tells WKBW he'll continue to fight.
When he first arrived in Ukraine in 2025, Seth Jimerson, a volunteer combat medic, served in the Pokrovsk offensive, a city and the administrative center of Pokrovsk Raion in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine.
"I've been helping casualties on the front line ever since the summer of 2025, and recently, during the spring offensive, the fighting has been getting very heavy," Jimerson told WKBW. "I was wounded in May. I was shot in the bladder. I lost an estimated 1 L to 1.25 L of blood."
After the injury, Jimerson spent 40 days in a hospital before making a difficult choice.
"I decided to leave the hospital as soon as possible, and decided to go back to the front, and I was wounded again, recently recovering from another injury," he said. "I took shrapnel to the hand and then shrapnel to the ear, as well as a mild traumatic brain injury."
He says he is now doing day visits for treatment, as Ukrainian hospitals are too full to admit long-term patients.
The two countries have ramped up their assaults over the past several months, with Jimerson noting a dramatic shift in combat.
"There are drones in the air 24/7," he said. "You cannot move 5 ft without seeing a drone or them seeing you, so it's a very slow movement."
For volunteers like Jimerson, the physical toll is compounded by significant financial and logistical challenges. When a soldier is wounded, their equipment is often left behind on the battlefield during the evacuation.
"Both times I got wounded, I lost all my gear," Jimerson said. "So now I got to keep buying gear, medic supplies. It's very difficult, and especially if we get extra treatment outside the hospitals, if we want to get more treatment, we have to pay for that."
Despite the danger and personal cost, Jimerson says his motivation is renewed every day by the people he is fighting alongside and the civilians affected by the war.
"When you're a foreigner in this country, and people know you're a foreigner and the Ukrainians ask you why you're here. And you say, 'I'm here to help you,' and you see the look on their face, and they just are really thankful for us to be here," he said.
WATCH: Gowanda man describes life on the front lines of Ukraine-Russia War
Russia launched an intense barrage of ballistic missiles and drones overnight into Saturday, killing at least nine people and wounding 33 civilians in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, authorities said.
The strikes follow a major Russian attack two days earlier that killed at least 10 people and wounded more than 50 others across Ukraine, as Moscow apparently looks to exploit Kyiv's critical shortage of Western-supplied anti-ballistic missile defenses.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has pressed the United States and other Western partners over Ukraine's need for more Patriot anti-ballistic missile defense systems to counter missile attacks from Russia.
"Every package of ballistic missile interceptors saves the lives of our people. And every night without them results in more casualties," he wrote on X following the latest attacks.
Jimerson says seeing the impact of these attacks on non-combatants is what hardens his resolve.
"We go 50 kilometers, 100 kilometers from the front line. We go to a city, and we go try to relax, but there's missiles from Russia hitting apartment buildings, and there's kids that die, there's families that die," he said. "The more war crimes Russia commits, the more motivated Ukraine gets, the more motivated the Americans get here."
"They just have to know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are," Jimerson said. "I know they might see stuff on the news, but from my perspective, Russia is by far the worst military I've seen commit war crimes and the stuff they've been doing to the Ukrainian people is terrible. It is very bad."
"And I just want people to know that you need, you need to know what the right side is on this war," Jimerson said.
At a NATO summit in Ankara in July, Trump said the U.S. would give Ukraine a license to make Patriot systems. Still, he appeared to move away from that commitment on Friday during a Cabinet meeting at the presidential retreat in Camp David, Maryland, saying he had not yet made a final decision on the matter.
