The first time Vitalii sat behind the wheel, the driving instructor froze.

“(The instructor) said, ‘Turn here.’ But I physically couldn’t,” Vitalii recalls.

In 2007, Vitalii sustained a spinal cord injury in an accident. Before that, he was a student in Kyiv – studying, working summer jobs at a sanatorium, doing freelance gigs, DJing at events, and still figuring out what he wanted to do with his life.

After his injury, he became a wheelchair user. He also lost mobility in his fingers.

“When I came to driving school, I immediately explained that standard hand controls wouldn't work for me,” he says. “But nobody even considered that a car could be adapted differently – in a way that would actually work for my body." 

In the mid-2010s, Vitalii says, the idea that a person with his type of injury could legally obtain a driver’s licence still seemed almost unimaginable to the authorities.

Holding the steering wheel was difficult, the gearbox was inaccessible, and using the indicators independently was nearly impossible. After several frustrating lessons, Vitalii’s father took matters into his own hands and began building a custom gearshift handle at home. 

“For the first five lessons, we weren’t learning how to drive – we were learning how to make it physically possible for me to operate the car at all,” Vitalii says.

Yet even after he had learned to drive, getting a licence remained nearly impossible.

In 2014, he began going through medical commissions and bureaucratic procedures, fully expecting to be rejected.

The problem, he explains, was not whether he could drive safely, but the outdated nature of the system itself.

For years, Ukrainian regulations focused on identifying "physical unfitness" rather than finding technical adaptations that would allow people to drive. Under the old Ministry of Health rules, any serious upper-limb impairment could effectively block a person from obtaining a licence. 

The system recognized only very limited forms of "manual driving adaptations" for people with lower-limb paralysis, while imposing extremely rigid requirements on hand mobility. Even minor limitations in finger movement were grounds for automatic rejection. 

As a result, a person’s actual ability to safely drive a modern automatic vehicle often meant nothing to the medical commission reviewing their case.

At the same time, accessible driving schools were almost non-existent. People who did not fit the "standard" model of driver training were forced to rely on a handful of outdated state centres using old Soviet-era cars. Even those who could afford to adapt vehicles privately often faced years of delays because there was no proper certification system for individual vehicle modifications.

“The problem was never whether I could drive. The problem was that the system didn’t even allow itself to imagine that I could,” Vitalii says.

Over the next nine years, Vitalii fought to dismantle that system while continuing his professional and advocacy work.

He spoke with officials at every opportunity and eventually managed to raise the matter with First Lady Olena Zelenska’s team. According to Vitalii, that connection finally drove the initiative forward.

In 2022, Ukraine’s Ministry of Health adopted new medical regulations that fundamentally changed the approach to assessing drivers with disabilities.

For the first time, the system shifted its focus from a person's medical diagnosis to their actual functionality.

Instead of treating physical differences as automatic disqualifications, the updated regulations introduced the principle of reasonable accommodation. The changes recognized that many more people with mobility-related impairments could safely drive – provided vehicles were equipped with the right adaptive solutions, from advanced hand controls to joysticks or modified pedals.

The focus had finally shifted from restrictions to possibilities.

Soon after, the Ministry of Internal Affairs launched the flagship Barrier-Free Driving Schools initiative.

Vitalii, who had spent years campaigning for the change, became involved in training instructors and demonstrating different approaches to vehicle adaptation.

Today, the initiative has grown into a network of seven inclusive driving schools across Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa, Dnipro, Kropyvnytskyi, and Kamianets-Podilskyi. Supported by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Government of Japan, the schools received eight adapted Toyota training vehicles and 14 tablets to aid the learning process. Beyond providing equipment, UNDP also supported the rebranding of the Barrier-Free Driving Schools initiative and launched a nationwide communication campaign to raise awareness, reduce stigma, and encourage more people with disabilities to pursue driver training.

At the same time, the programme focused on strengthening institutional capacity. Representatives from the Ministry of Internal Affairs took part in study visits to the Netherlands to examine European approaches to inclusive driver education, assistive technologies, and modern assessment methods for drivers with disabilities. This experience is already helping to shape broader reforms across Ukraine’s inclusive driving and licensing system.

Vitalii trained the staff at the Ministry of Internal Affairs service centres, as well as specialists from the Barrier-Free Driving Schools network, to work with people with disabilities. Later, he became one of the first to receive a driver’s licence through the initiative. More than two years on, he has driven over 70,000 kilometres, and hundreds of thousands of other Ukrainians – people once considered "unfit" to drive by the system – now have the chance to learn, drive, and live more independently.

Photos: UNDP Ukraine