Aug. 27, afternoon. School No. 14 on the outskirts of Ilovaisk
After several attempts, Andriy Kashuba finally managed to send a short text message to his brigade commander, Andriy Tarnavsky of the 17th Tank Brigade of the Ukrainian Ground Forces. The signal was often weak and the calls were not billed as local Ukrainian ones.
The message was in code.
“I said that everything is going well at the summer pioneer camp, the water in the river is warm and we are having fun,” recalled Kashuba, the commander of the Special Tactical Team South, a company of troops drawn from various units sent to reinforce the volunteer units in Iloviask. “The fellows told me later that the commander didn’t believe he’d got a message from me. Nobody knew what had happened to us.”
At that time, Kashuba’s unit had already been encircled in the besieged town of Ilovaisk, 30 kilometers southeast of Donetsk, for a couple of days. They knew they had been left to face the enemy without help. The situation among the soldiers was tense, Kashuba said.
Andriy Kashuba, a former commander of the Special Tactical Team South, talks to the Kyiv Post at Odesa Military Academy (Oleg Petrasiuk).
“But I knew my fighters looked to me as a figure for support,” he said. “If I started panicking, they would start to panic as well. A soldier always sees his commander as an alpha male.”
Kashuba, who usually went by his nom-de-guerre of “Apis” (the sacred bull in Egyptian mythology worshipped in the Memphis region), has a tall, muscular physique. His bald look gives him the air of a dominant leader, but his fatherly tones compensate for a somewhat scary appearance.
“I always assured them that we were going to be fine,” he said.
Going east
In July, Kashuba got an assignment to form a new combat team to reinforce Ukrainian army positions near the Russian-held city of Donetsk. His new Special Tactical Team South was comprised of armor from the 17th Tank Brigade and infantry from the 93rd Brigade.
They were never told where they would finally be sent.
Traveling through Starobesheve and Hrabske, where the Ukrainian army had exchanged fire with a large group of Russian-led fighters, Kashuba’s group reached the village of Kobzari, some two kilometers west of Ilovaisk.
“I’d never heard about Ilovaisk before,” Kashuba admits. “But we had to get inside and get dug in inside the city.” Ilovaisk was seen as vital in the Ukrainian army’s efforts to separate the two Russian-occupied strongholds – Donetsk and Luhansk. By 5 p.m. on Aug. 17, Kashuba’s group was in the city.
Kashuba explained they soon captured school No. 14 on the western edge of the city, where they slept in the hallways and classrooms and found a shelter in a gym when shelling was heavy. Civilians also flocked to the school looking for refuge. Kashuba explains they give the civilians – most of whom were elderly women and children – their food packs, but at the same time had to search some of them.
Andriy Kashuba in the meeting room of Odesa Military Academy (Oleg Petrasiuk).
“The soldiers often found spotters among civilians. The war has taught me to trust no one, especially there (in the Donbas),” he said. “Even though we were in our homeland, those people were sort of enemies.”
The railroad, which split the city in two, became the frontline between the Ukrainian soldiers and Russian proxy forces. There was no electricity, and Kashuba’s soldiers drew water from nearby wells and searched the basements of the houses looking for kompot – a homemade stewed fruit drink.
Revealing map
The next days in the city were marked by constant shelling – 152 mm artillery shells and Grad rockets rained down on the Ukrainian positions in Ilovaisk.
Speaking on Ukraine’s Independence Day Aug. 24 in Kyiv, President Petro Poroshenko promised to send the columns of armor that took part in the military parade in Kyiv directly to the front line in the hope that they would be enough to stop a full-scale invasion by regular Russian troops.
At the same time some 800 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, Kashuba was sitting in a garage on the outskirts of Ilovaisk and listening carefully to reconnaissance team reports.
“There was way too much heavy armor around for it to be separatists,” Kashuba said.
He had an old topographic map of Donetsk Oblast and marked all the positions from which Ukrainian troops had withdrawn. At the same time, he marked the towns and villages through which the Russian regular troops had entered Ukraine. The dots on the map – one-by-one – started to pick out almost a full circle.
By the afternoon, Kashuba understood that the situation was bad. He called all the commanders and they had a strategic session in one of the school’s classroom.
“I told them ‘Congratulations, guys, we’re surrounded by Russians,” Kashuba recalled. “A lot of people were confused. We started contacting (General Ruslan) Khomchak, and sharing the news with them, but they couldn’t confirm anything.”
The night on the Independence Day was sinisterly quiet. “They never shelled us then,” Kashuba said.
The next day brought even more worry, when the Special Tactical Team South called for reinforcements of artillery, but nothing came in. Then they were told not to send their wounded away from Ilovaisk.
Retreating
Kashuba was the last one to leave the city early on the morning of Aug. 29. He was in the military column traveling to Mnohopillya with his troops and two infantry fighting vehicles. After five kilometers, they came under fire.
“I think the Russians used the element of surprise, and took advantage of the fact that there was a lack of coordination between the units,” he explained. One of his mechanized infantry fighting vehicles hit a Russian tank, but later was hit itself. Kashuba got to the village of Chervonosilske where he saw another Russian tank with a white flag. He thought it was a good time to reload their guns, but then the tank opened fire and Kashuba was badly wounded by shrapnel from a tank shell. He could hardly feel his arm.
He lost a lot of blood and was struggling to stay alive. Serhiy Mishchenko of the Donbas battalion helped him to a field hospital. For the next two days, Kashuba was on the verge of life and death. Flies were buzzing around now-rotting flesh on his arm.
“That was the most horrifying time,” he said.
They surrendered to Russian troops on Aug. 31. Since Kashuba was badly wounded, he was transported to the nearest field hospital and later to the city of Dnipro. On the first day of fall, Kashuba had the first operation on his arm.
“I asked the doctor whether they will sedate me, and when I heard that was the plan, I sighed with relief and said: ‘I can finally get some sleep.’”
