The international delegation, headed by Ana Lucía Bueno, ICRC Public Health Coordinator, and Sujit Panda, Head of the Physical Rehabilitation…
He could have chosen a rear-line career but consciously went to the front.
24-year-old Senior Lieutenant Pavlo recounts what he lived through and stresses that his choice was deliberate.
His story was published on the page of the 39th Regiment of the National Guard of Ukraine.
“To lead people into battle, you must go through it yourself”, — he believes.
His path to war began at the National Guard Academy. But his true baptism of fire happened when he was still a cadet in the Kharkiv region in 2022.
“That’s where our unit destroyed the first two Russian KrAZ trucks. That’s when I first felt what it means to repel the enemy”, — he recalls.
After graduating from the Academy and assignment, he consciously chose a combat unit. Dreaming of working as a sniper, he quickly became an assault soldier, completing three months of intensive training.
His combat path ran through the Serebrianske Forest, where he suffered his first concussion, and then to urban battles near New York.
“There the Russians tried to close the ring. Those were urban battles. You see the enemy, you see how you destroy him. That hits the psyche the hardest”, — he shares.
The most difficult ordeal was the encirclement at the industrial zone of the water treatment station in the Toretsk direction. There were only three of them. For 14 days they remained under constant mortar and artillery fire.
“We sat for 14 days under unceasing fire. The nearest enemy position was an arm’s length away. They observed us through reconnaissance drones that worked around the clock, replacing one another”, — he says.
The situation became critical when Russian spotters located them. One of them turned out to be a recruited prisoner.
“I spent 40 minutes on the radio trying to persuade one of them to surrender. I knew he was afraid, but in the end I had to eliminate him”, — Pavlo recalls.
The breakout from encirclement happened on his birthday. After unbearable psychological pressure, he remembered the only chance.
“I was so exhausted that I simply prayed to God for salvation. And when I fell asleep with that thought, the idea ‘came’ to me: a gap under the slate. We crawled there”, — he says.
The group came under 120-mm mortar fire; Pavlo was wounded but continued directing the evacuation.
After rehabilitation, despite multiple concussions and blood pressure issues, he returned to the Toretsk direction.
At the beginning of 2025 Pavlo was already performing missions in the Pokrovsk direction. There he was group leader, escorting units and coordinating their actions.
“I was the senior one, escorting groups and relaying information. Our task was to hold one position because its loss threatened other brigades with semi-encirclement”, — he explains.
He has experience as an assault soldier and reconnaissance soldier, and possesses skills in tactical medicine and engineering-sapper work — learned in practice.
He passes on his experience to comrades who have just joined the National Guard and does not rule out returning to the front again.
“You will survive if you do everything as you were taught. All information given is useful, but some of it is 100% essential. You must know how to use a tourniquet, how to use a navigation app or other map programs”, — Pavlo says.
According to him, all mistakes must be minimized and analyzed. You can simply get lost — and then you’re “a two-hundred” (killed).
If a soldier hesitates, misses something, looks in the wrong place, fails to focus — he will die.
The war drastically changed Pavlo’s worldview.
“I changed completely. My values became crystal clear: family, time, brotherhood. I saw war not in the news, but through the prism of what I lived through”, — he says.
