Aug. 30, afternoon. A private house in the village of Novokaterynivka
Artem Kravchenko climbed into a barn and gulped down water from a pig’s trough. Then he climbed out and lay exhausted in the yard of the house.
Water was the only thing that the badly wounded Kravchenko, a soldier of the Dnipro 1 volunteer battalion, had craved for over a day.
After receiving three bullet wounds and five shrapnel wounds when a Ukrainian military column was shelled by Russian troops, Kravchenko, then 23, pretended he was dead and lay in a field bleeding. He spent a night trembling from cold, and drank his own urine to survive.
In the morning, he started making his way to the nearby village of Novokaterynivka, stopping every 150 meters when he ran out of strength, or when Russian soldiers passed by.
Kravchenko didn’t want to be captured. But that’s what happened to him when a local man saw him lying in the yard.
“He told me: ‘No offense, but I will hand you over to the Russians just after I bury the dead bodies of your soldiers that are lying by my fence,’” Kravchenko recalled. “He promised that Russians wouldn’t kill me. They didn’t.”
Dead soldiers, burned out armored vehicles, and destroyed houses were evidence of the bitter fighting the village endured the day before between Russian and Ukrainian troops. Most of the locals had left Novokaterynivka, but the man had stayed to feed his cattle.
The local man supported the Russian side but had pity for the Ukrainians. He gave Kravchenko some water, bread, and salo (a traditional Ukrainian food of salted raw pork fat, or lard). He also took cell phones from the dead Ukrainian soldiers so as to let their relatives know where they were buried.
Artem Kravchenko talks to the Kyiv Post at his local school in Verkhivtseve town in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
Captivity and salvation
The Russian soldiers arrived by an APC and asked what kind of military equipment Kravchenko had received from NATO. He honestly answered that his Kalashnikov machine gun was older than his mother.
The Russians brought him to their military positions and treated his wounds. They called him a member of the private army of Ihor Kolomoisky, an oligarch who then governed Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and financially supported Dnipro 1 Battalion. Kravchenko argued that his battalion was part of the Interior Ministry’s forces.
On the next day, Kravchenko was released along with other wounded and spent a month in hospital.
While he was still recovering, Kravchenko, who was a political activist, participated in the parliament elections of the autumn of 2014, but failed to win a seat. In 2015, he was more successful in the local elections running as a candidate from Ukrop – Kolomoisky’s political party. He was elected head of his local community council in Dnipropetrovsk region.
Hopeless situation
Kravchenko said he had decided to run for mayor of his hometown of Verkhivtseve when he was lying helplessly in the field by Novokaterynivka.
The wagon in which he had been traveling was hit by mortar fire, and blew up just after he managed to get out of it. Pieces of shrapnel from the blast pierced his body. Kravchenko couldn’t walk, and asked his fellow soldiers to cut his bulletproof west off so that he could crawl.
He was in such a hopeless condition that the other soldiers took away his medical kit as well.
Later, a young Russian soldier spotted him crawling along the road.
“He touched my shoulder, and I asked him for help,” Kravchenko remembers. “He took away my web gear, got back in his armored vehicle and drove away. He didn’t help me, but he didn’t kill me.”
Friends come to visit Artem Kravchenko at the hospital, where he was recovering from the grave wounds received near Ilovaisk. (photo from personal archive of Artem Kravchenko)
Three killed teachers
Kravchenko was sent to Ilovaisk in mid-August, after undergoing a short period training with a dozen other politically active men, all with zero combat experience.
He took fancy civilian shorts to wear in Ilovaisk in anticipation of the rapid liberation of the city, and a Ukrainian flag to hoist atop the government offices.
But he soon realized the Ukrainian troops were unable to fully control even the half of the city they had managed to take.
“We had many different units without clear subordination and coordination,” Kravchenko said.
Many of volunteer fighters were coming and going from their positions, which added to the chaos of the operation. And according to his official papers, Kravchenko was to serve not in Ilovaisk but in the city of Mariupol, 130 kilometers to the south.
The soldiers were short of food, and survived on tomatoes they took from local gardens and canned vegetables they found in the houses abandoned by inhabitants.
Kravchenko spent days in dugouts, initially defending the kindergarten where Dnipro 1 was based, and later, when the separatists pushed forward, a school — the final stronghold of Ukraine’s forces in the town.
He spent his last days in Ilovaisk at a military position in a private house along with three young school teachers. All three were Ukrainian patriots from the largely pro-Russian eastern Ukraine.
“They were Slavik from Snizhne – he taught Russian language, Yurko from Donetsk, who taught history, and Max from Zhovty Vody, who was a trainer of combat hopak (a traditional Ukrainian dance). They were all killed on the way out of Ilovaisk,” Kravchenko said.
“The best people died there.”
The tactical shoes Artem Kravchenko used to have during his military campaign. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
The Dnipro 1 volunteer battalion was formed in April 2014 as a special police force to defend Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, located next to the embattled Donbas. The then-Dnipropetrovsk Oblast governor, oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, supported the battalion and paid its soldiers, a fact that caused critics to call Dnipro 1 Kolomoisky’s private army. The battalion’s soldiers participated in the battle for Ilovaisk from Aug. 18, 2014, and lost 17 soldiers during the operation. Battalion head Yury Bereza was elected to parliament in autumn 2014. In September 2014, Dnipro 1 was turned into a special police regiment. Its soldiers still serve in the Donbas, patrolling the war-torn region along the second line of defense.
