Dmytro is from Odesa. His love for the sea began with his father's stories and the Aivazovsky prints in his mother's book. Fishing, spearfishing, and later commercial diving. Then russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, and in the spring of 2022 Dmytro volunteered for the army, serving in the 81st Air Assault Brigade. In November, near Bilohorivka, he was severely wounded: 23 fragments, damage to the brachial nerve plexus, and his right arm left hanging without sensation.
During the evacuation, the group was ambushed. To save the others, he had to be left behind in a crater left by an air strike. He lay there for around twelve hours, through the evening and the night, listening to the enemy talking nearby, and only in the morning, by some strength he cannot explain, did he make it back to his own. Then came the operations, Latvia, rehabilitation, constant pain and disability. The hardest part was knowing there was no going back to the life he had before.
And then came the offer to join a rehabilitation sailing trip. Dmytro agreed, though he was in a difficult emotional state and held no real expectations. But seven days in the ocean changed that. He took to the sailing life and its new challenges so fully that he carried out every command from the captain to the letter, supported his brothers-in-arms and worked on the boat despite the pain and discomfort of his combat injuries. Mooring, watches, shifts in the galley: all of it moved him forward. And the wind in the sails was so strong that this was the moment Dmytro felt himself returning to life.
After the trip, on the recommendation of Volodymyr Kopot, the skipper of his catamaran, Dmytro enrolled in a sailing school. First the theory, then practice in Greece. He sat the practical exam alongside other students, and admits that he never told any of them he was a veteran of the russian-Ukrainian war. At a certain point the instructor told him he was ready, and that his skipper's licence would come within a month. Today Dmytro stands at the helm himself, and has even managed to buy a small yacht of his own.
"That was the moment I realised I had broken out of the four walls my mind had been living in."
Dmytro Losev, a titan of the first trip, is today a professional skipper and part of the skipper team at Titans Under Sails.
