It has been five years since the day the tragic Battle of Donetsk Airport finally reached its gruesome conclusion.
On Jan. 20, 2015, Russian-backed militants managed to detonate the abutments of the airport’s recently-built terminal, which had already been almost completely ruined after months of fierce fighting.
The major explosion crumbled the building’s ceiling in many places, effectively burying the last standing Ukrainian fighters under debris. This marked the finale to the unprecedented 242-day defense, in which the ruined airport was Ukraine’s final frontier in the city of Donetsk occupied by the Kremlin proxies.
The gory battle quickly became symbolic, with the Ukrainian garrison consisting of airborne troops and mechanized infantry forces reinforced with the Right Sector irregulars gaining the iconic nickname “The Cyborgs” for their extremely fierce, die-hard resistance to an overwhelming enemy.
It will be remembered in history for the brutal, cutthroat carnage amid dusty ruins, where opposing troops engaged each other in Stalingrad-style close combat over every room and corner.
On the battle’s final day, 49 Ukrainian troops died under the airport debris. Only a handful of the last surviving “cyborgs” managed to escape the killing zone and retreat to the home front over the ensuing few days.
According to the Book of Memory of the Perished For Ukraine, a war memorial project, Ukrainian forces sustained 96 verified fatalities in the course of the battle, with four Cyborgs missing in action and nearly 440 injured.
For Russian-sponsored forces, this extorted success came at a heavy cost. According to Ukraine’s military, the enemy sustained nearly 800 fatalities, and up to 2,000 militants were injured. As further events showed, this was a Pyrrhic victory: The militants gained only a skeleton of useless ruins, while Ukrainian forces up to this day hold the ground just several hundreds of meters from the former airport, therefore maintaining control over its strategically important runway.
Five years after into the battle’s end, the country’s leadership, together with families of the killed Ukrainian warriors, came to the memorial complex at the Ministry of Defense in Kyiv to commemorate “The Cyborgs” and their sacrifice.
