Background: By early August, Ukrainian forces were worn out and spread dangerously thin across hundreds of miles of the country’s border with Russia. After successfully liberating Popasna and Lysychansk in Luhansk Oblast, the next target was Ilovaisk – a strategic railway junction – located 40 kilometers east of the Russian-led forces’ stronghold of Donetsk.
The General’s Staff idea was to retake Ilovaisk so the Ukrainian army would be able to cut the highway serving as Russia’s supply line to its proxies holed up in Donetsk. Ukraine’s commanders thought there were very few separatist fighters in the city and that they were poorly armed.
With the regular army units spread around the city from the west – in the villages of Grabske and Mnohopillya, a farming hamlet 10 kilometers south of Ilovaisk – the offensive on the city itself was left to volunteer units to carry out.
Sergiy Mishchenko in his office in Kyiv (Oleg Petrasiuk)
Aug. 19, the city of Ilovaisk
When Sergiy Mishchenko went to the war zone in the Donbas after Russia started its war against Ukraine, all he had was a rifle, some bullets, and hope.
Those were the only things he was given when his unit, the Donbas Battalion, was ordered to retake the besieged city of Ilovaisk in mid-August 2014.
The first attempt to capture the city on Aug. 10 failed, but the battalion made another one early on Aug. 18 and this time got behind enemy lines. They dug trenches and set up checkpoints. The starry summer night was sinisterly quiet.
In the early hours of Aug. 19, no one had expected Ukrainians had entered the city. Then the Donbas Battalion had their first encounter with Russian-led forces in Ilovaisk.
“Everything was moving at lightning speed,” Mishchenko recalled. “They fired machine guns at us while riding their motorbikes.” he recalls.
The Ukrainians saw a white Bogdan bus packed with Russian-led fighters. The sign on the bus read “Bastards.”
The Donbas Battalion – like all the other units of the poorly equipped Ukrainian forces, didn’t have much armor. However, the army did give them five BMD-1 Soviet-era amphibious tracked fighting vehicles to support their infantry. They also had some machine guns and grenade launchers, and a mortar they had captured from Russian-led forces.
High hopes
The battalion had no shortage of fighting spirit, but their original mission had been to patrol areas liberated by the army, rather than carry out offensive operations by themselves.
“It was scary, but that was the main goal then – to get into the city and clear it (of Russian-led forces),” Mishchenko recalled.
Even though the Russian-led forces had grenade launchers they were not able to fire back because the Donbas Battalion fighters reacted immediately. Mishchenko and his fellows got into the bus and took all of the enemy fighters captive. But then they had to get to Russian-held side of the city by crossing a bridge – which made them easy targets for snipers from the other side.
“We were pretty bold: We took those (of the Russian-led fighters) who were able to move, and started running with them to their side of the city,” Mishchenko said.
The plan was to encircle the city and cut it off from Khartsyzk, an industrial city in Donetsk Oblast that was already under control of Russian-led forces and was reportedly used as part of the Russian supply line.
“Our idea was to attract all of the attention to our group, so that the Dnipro and Azov battalions could easily get to the city,” Mishchenko said.
Some 70 Donbas Battalion fighters got into the occupied part of the city, shielding themselves with the Russian-led fighters they’d taken captive. The operation looked to have been a success, and Mishchenko and his comrades hoped they could take the whole city – if the other Ukrainian volunteer units joined the fight.
“We’d already seen the building of the city council (captured earlier by Russian-led forces) but we were never reinforced,” Mishchenko recalls. “The attack failed.”
The Dnipro-1 and Azov Battalion units, which were supposed to push into Ilovaisk from the eastern side of the city (starting from the village of Vynohradne) didn’t get support from heavy artillery and never got there on time.
Meanwhile, the Russian-led forces reinforced their positions and the Ukrainian soldiers had to retreat.
“The snipers from that side acted effectively – first of all, they killed all the officers. They chose their goal and worked on it clearly,” Mischenko said. His unit suffered four dead and more than 10 wounded on the first day.
The two sides fought each other to a stalemate, with the Ukrainians hunkered down to the west of the railway line that bisects Ilovaisk, and Russian-led forces entrenched in the east.
Back to school
Retreating and demoralized, Mishchenko’s group returned to the school they had taken earlier. There were around 200 Donbas Battalion fighters there, and civilians were also using the old building as a safe haven. Few of them were happy that Ukrainian forces had entered the city, disrupting their regular routine.
“We had to search them, and if we noticed that they had a working cellphone days after the attack, we knew those were disguised spotters,” Mishchenko said. “Sometimes, when we saw the civilians rushing to the school building, it was a clear indication that an attack was about to start.”
Starting from Aug. 19, there were three or four shelling attacks a day, according to Mishchenko.
On the same day that Mishchenko’s unit lost their comrades, he received a new assignment – to set up a hospital in the school. He had to tend to the wounded in the middle of mayhem, and the city was soon cut off from water and food supplies.
“We were short of everything: order, rifles and even food,” Mishchenko says.
Sergiy Mishchenko carries supplies in Ilovaisk on Aug. 28. 2014 (Markiian Lyseiko)
Defeated
Mishchenko, then 36, quickly became accustomed to his new role, even though he didn’t know much about war: a native of Kyiv, before the war he worked in marketing and enjoyed playing airsoft.
During the EuroMaidan Revolution, he enrolled in a paramedic training course. He got the chance to use his new skills on Aug. 29.
When the Ukrainian soldiers, including Mishchenko, moved in a military column to break out of encirclement in Ilovaisk to Mnohopillya, where their convoy suddenly came under artillery fire.
Many of the soldiers ditched their vehicles in a corn field and ran into the village of Chervonosilske. As machine-gun and sniper fire tore into them, they decided to take shelter in local houses. Mishchenko and his fellows cleared five houses of Russian troops who were positioned there.
“They were providing covering fire for the main forces,” Mishchenko says. “They thought their main groups had killed us with artillery fire, but we were taught that if we were ambushed we had to attack, no matter what. It was a life and death battle.”
They took five Russian soldiers captive and when the standoff was over, the Donbas Battalion and Ukrainian army troops brought their wounded to one of the houses that had been made into a makeshift hospital.
“It was like in Medieval times – we had to do operations by candlelight and with no medicines,” Mishchenko said. At 6 p.m. Mishchenko was asked by the Russian troops positioned near Chervonosilske to treat two of their wounded fighters.
The book “Voice of War” lies on Mishchenko’s desk in his office in Kyiv. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
“I understood where I was heading to, but it was a mission – our idea was to use up more time so maybe help would arrive,” he said. The Russians didn’t have a medic on the spot: in exchange, they released a Ukrainian soldier whom they had captured earlier.
But the help never came, and on Aug. 30 Mishchenko and his unit were forced to surrender and were taken captive by Russian forces.
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.
