Aug. 30, early morning. A field by the village of Novozarivka
For the first time in his life, Oleksandr Fedorchenko didn’t want to see first beams of sunlight cut through the dark.
As he was crawling through Russian military positions in the fields of war-torn Donbas, Fedorchenko only hoped he would find a road before dawn. Otherwise, his insignia and uniform would give him away as a Ukrainian soldier. And that would have meant death.
On the chilly night of Aug. 30, Fedorchenko, a Donbas Battalion fighter, attempted to find his way from the village of Chervonosilske after a Ukrainian military column was obliterated. The column was attacked after Russian President Vladimir Putin called on his proxies to open a humanitarian corridor to allow trapped Ukrainian fighters out of encirclement in the town of Ilovaisk alive.
Fedorchenko was one of the Ukrainian soldiers who refused to give in to the Russian troops.
“I was more scared of captivity than death,” he said.
Green corridor
Fedorchenko, who mainly went by his nom-de-guerre “Brest,” was in a military column of Ukrainian soldiers on Aug. 29 when it suddenly came under fire from mortars and heavy machine guns.
He was following a truck with at least 24 people in it, driving an off-road vehicle.
“I still remember how something like an anti-tank guided missile hit the truck. In a blink of an eye, there was no hood, just two severely wounded soldiers and one on fire,” Fedorchenko recalls. “It’s like one moment you see people in front of you and a second after there’s not even a sign of them.”
As the vehicles started exploding, some soldiers attempted to flee. Fedorchenko got out of his car to see who’d been firing on them. Some 400 meters to the left, he saw a tank partly hidden in a defensive ditch.
Fedorchenko and his fellow soldier Yevheniy Telnov, known by the nom-de-guerre “Usach,” told their commander that they were ready to hit the enemy tank. But as they approached the tank, it turned out that there was another one some way behind it. The first tank was empty, but Fedorchenko spotted three people behind the turret of the second one. They were chatting to each other and didn’t notice the Ukrainian soldiers.
“We only had a minute and a grenade gun, so it was too late to hesitate,” Fedorchenko said. They hit the tank with the only grenade gun they had. One soldier was killed, another wounded, and third one ran away.
Breathing heavily, Fedorchenko aimed his weapon at the young wounded soldier as he approached him: “He started begging not to kill him because ‘we’re brothers.’ I said what the f*ck are you talking about, you entered my country to murder us.”
Fedorchenko left the Russian soldier alive. He doesn’t know what happened to him. It was the first time he had come face-to-face with a Russian soldier. He checked the soldier’s documents before leaving him and learned that the wounded man was 22 and from Kaliningrad Oblast, a standalone Russian territory squeezed between Poland and Lithuania.
Fedorchenko and Telnov planned to explore the area for more vehicles, but received a command to return to the village of Chervonosilske, where the Donbas Battalion had found a temporary refuge.
But as ceasefire talks went on, the two soldiers decided to get out of the village themselves, because they couldn’t face surrendering to the Russians. They walked part of the way together, but soon had to separate as they couldn’t agree on which way to take.
Per aspera ad inferi
Fedorchenko’s escape took him a day-and-a-half.
“I saw the bowels, the torn limbs of my fellows,” Fedorchenko recalls, his eyes glazed for a moment. “I had a feeling that I would find my death there, too and then all of a sudden there was no fear. I felt almost indifferent.”
He kept walking and close to dusk reached a crossroad dotted with enemy checkpoints: there was no way he could get pass it as it was patrolled by people in green military uniforms. Fedorchenko saw lengthy rows of plowed land and a bunch of bushes some 40 meters away from the road.
He crawled fast to the bushes. Fedorchenko knew he was close to a Russian military encampment, but decided to try his luck. He slept in the bushes until darkness, and then started moving.
“I saw people with thermal imaging cameras for night monitoring in the distance, and felt desperate,” Fedorchenko said. He was sure the Russian soldiers saw him, but nobody approached him.
He thinks it could have been thanks to his relatively short stature – 1.66 meters – which may have meant they thought he was a child.
“For quite a while I walked literally up the trenches – you can tell it because then the ground underneath you is sort of unstable and dodgy,” he said. “Once I saw the head of a soldier sticking out of a trench. What could I do? I just walked over him. He had no idea who I was, I could have been anyone, just a person in uniform carrying a rifle.”
Exhausted and dazed, Fedorchenko struggled to remain awake until he finally reached the village of Novozarivka, almost 30 kilometers south of Chervonosilske. He needed to get to Komsomolske to his fellows. With no maps or GPS available, he had ended up just four kilometers off course, as he learned later.
“It was probably 15 minutes before dawn when I saw the village,” Fedorchenko said.
While on the road, he made two phone calls: one to his mom, and the other to fellow mechanic driver who had left Ilovaisk earlier to get new armored vehicles. The driver told Fedorchenko where to go.
He stopped the first car he saw.
“There were civilians in it, and I told them were I had to go,” Fedorchenko explained, adding that they stopped the car immediately when they saw he had a rifle. “But I felt like a jerk so I gave them Hr 100 in the end, and asked to buy sweets for their kids.”
Oleksandr Fedorchenko talks to the Kyiv Post at a coffee shop in Kyiv. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
In Komsomolske, Fedorchenko was picked up by paramedics.
His feet were bleeding, as he had been walking in sneakers through fields for more than 30 hours: “We (the Donbas Battalion) always fought in the cities or towns, so I didn’t even have combat boots, it was too hot for them in summer. But if I’d had to go a bit longer in my thin sneakers, I’d have probably lost my feet there.”
The Donbas Battalion is a volunteer Ukraine National Guard unit subordinate to the Interior Ministry . The formation was established in April 2014 when Russia started its military intervention in Ukraine. The battalion was created by Semen Semenchenko, an ethnic Russian native of Donetsk, who is a major in the National Guard of Ukraine. In summer 2014, the Donbas Battalion took part in all the major battles in the east of Ukraine – from Artemivsk and Sloviansk in Donetsk Oblast, to Popasna and Lysychansk in Luhansk Oblast. In the battle of Ilovaisk, the Donbas Battalion lost 67 soldiers and had more than 173 wounded, according to the figures provided by the National Guard.
