The international delegation, headed by Ana Lucía Bueno, ICRC Public Health Coordinator, and Sujit Panda, Head of the Physical Rehabilitation…
Watching the news every day, he weighed all the pros and cons, and one day he simply realized that he had to go and fight for freedom with his own hands.
The story of the soldier was published on the page of the Separate Presidential Brigade named after Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky.
Bohdan, call sign “Vakha”, recalls his decision to join the army in 2015. He says he called his parents already on the way to the training ground. The reaction was predictable: “They said I was a fool”.
After training, he was assigned as a senior gunner on a self-propelled gun “Hyacinth” and sent to the ATO zone in the Mariupol sector.
According to him, they worked a lot.
“Rotations lasted about a month, we constantly moved through the tree lines and ‘boomed’, then returned to the base to rest for a couple of days — and again a month of hard work”, — Bohdan recalls.
In 2015, near Mariupol, an episode occurred that engraved the name “Vakha” into the “execution lists” of the so-called “L/DNR”. His unit received coordinates of the artillery group “Sparta”, commanded by the militant “Motorola”. Working as a gunner, Bohdan sent 46 shells to enemy positions in 22 minutes.
He worked so fast and so accurately that the command did not believe it at first. When the aerial reconnaissance launched a drone, there were no doubts left: all enemy equipment had been turned into scrap metal.
Later, Bohdan was awarded the badge “For the Defense of Mariupol”: on that very day, he gave his medal to a small boy in the city, keeping only the certificate as a memory.
Later, “Vakha” was demobilized, but after the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022 he returned to the army as a reservist. He was trained as an assault trooper, but as soon as the command learned about his experience and achievements during the ATO, he was immediately transferred to artillery.
In 2022, Bohdan took part in battles in the Kharkiv region, and later carried out missions in the operation in the Kursk region, which reminded him of the ATO times.
“The distance between our positions and the enemy’s positions was very small, a lot of chaos, recon-sabotage groups wandering around. At some point we captured winter jackets of the ‘Akhmat’ fighters, put them on because it was cold, and they were new and unworn. And then it turned out that other ‘Akhmat’ fighters had positions not far from us, and they didn’t open fire on us because they thought we were ‘their own’”, — he says.
After the Kursk region, Bohdan fell seriously ill, underwent long rehabilitation, and was discharged from service due to health reasons. However, after half a year of treatment, “Vakha” obtained assignment documents to his old unit, passed the medical commission, and returned to service as a mechanic-driver of an SPG.
“My children wouldn’t let me go. I had to, so to speak, mislead them a little. I said that I had to replace a comrade-in-arms because he was seriously ill, just as I once was. My team is like a second family”, — the soldier concluded.
