The international delegation, headed by Ana Lucía Bueno, ICRC Public Health Coordinator, and Sujit Panda, Head of the Physical Rehabilitation…
Sergeant of the 95th Air Assault Polissia Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Yevhenii was a carpenter in civilian life, and then became a paratrooper and we
A conversation with the soldier was published on February 13 on the brigade’s channel.
Yevhenii will never forget one of the battles.
“My pulse is pounding in my head, blood is flowing. I lift my head — I see a Russian tank already next to me. Five meters away. It stalls. I see the letter ‘Z’. I hear someone climbing out… Buryats. They did not take prisoners. I realize this is the end…
Then I hear on the armor a sound like ‘lup-lup-lup’, like someone hitting metal. I see the Buryat driver hiding in the hatch, and their commander doesn’t make it — he’s killed… Our commander Makovskyi saved our lives, it gave us time to crawl away”, — Yevhenii recalls.
The paratrooper adds that Makovskyi was also wounded, but risked himself to save his comrades: “Brotherhood is the foundation of the army. We will fight for each other till the end”.
Then came Yatskivka in the Kharkiv region. October 2022. His first assault as a squad leader. A war of deception, where the enemy put on Ukrainian identification marks to confuse and strike from behind.
Yevhenii’s group began clearing the settlement. They very successfully passed through their area and secured it.
“But it turned out that the Russians knew we’d be entering Yatskivka and had prepared. Our group ended up surrounded. I had to lead my men to make a corridor so everyone could get out alive”, — Yevhenii says.
Comrades from another brigade were coming as reinforcements — they were expected.
“And then we see a tank entering. Everyone has blue tape on their sleeves. That was our color. The first thought was that it was reinforcements. But I saw one with white tape. It was the enemy! They had disguised themselves that way — one of them probably forgot to change the tape and that saved us”, — the paratrooper recalls.
His unit opened intense fire on the enemy. The assault lasted from six in the morning until ten in the evening.
Continuous shelling, clearing houses one by one, vehicles in flames. They held out. They liberated the settlement and freed their comrades.
Today Yevhenii is the chief sergeant of the company of the 13th Air Assault Battalion named after Hero of Ukraine Colonel Taras Seniuk.
He trains new arrivals harshly, because he knows the price of mistakes. He teaches them to shoot, to hear drones, to identify drops, to understand technological warfare. He has dozens of assaults behind him.
When asked about his age and about the “kids” who came under the “18–24 program”, — Yevhenii just smiles. Because he was like that too — he joined the army as a young guy in 2021, before the word “assault” became part of daily vocabulary.
Back then, the 22-year-old carpenter swapped the roofs of peaceful homes for the open sky of a paratrooper.
“The army turns a boy into a man, a defender. I trained the ‘18–24s’, and I saw them return after their first assault. How they change, become warriors. I’ve been wounded three times, but I returned each time because my guys are here. I must be here with them until victory. The most important thing in the army is to have a backbone”, — Yevhenii believes.
