Editor’s Note: Ukraine’s Heroes is a Kyiv Post project devoted to Ukrainian army heroes injured in Russia’s war against the nation. Periodically we will tell the stories of these wounded warriors, many of whom need money for treatment, surgeries and prosthesis. At least 1,028 soldiers have been killed and 3,627 injured in the war so far. Andriy Yaremchuk, 30, says he was mobilized to the army on March 31 as an excavator and left the war zone only after a severe leg wound two months ago from a shrapnel injury. He smiles when asked if he thought of ignoring the army call. "Of course not, why would I skip my duty," he says.
His mother Anna Yaremchuk says “skipping duty” would have been easy. “His father is a colonel, it would take just one phone call and no one would bother him ever again, but he decided to go,” she said.
“And I don’t regret it,” her son smiles.
Yaremchuk spent a few weeks in the Kyiv Military Hospital and a week in the Irpin Military Hospital, not far from Kyiv. After several surgeries, Yaremchuk was sent home, but she is back in the Irpin hospital again. There are some complications with the wound. “Doctors say rehabilitation will take up to a year, but it seems they just didn’t want to scare me,” the soldier says.
The man was in the engineer combat brigade and says they got trapped by separatist fighters. Before that, his brigade travelled across the whole country digging trenches and tank traps, building fortifications and block posts everywhere, starting from Kherson and Mykolayiv oblasts and then in the war zone. On July 4, the brigade was sent to Shchastya, a city some 15 kilometers from Luhansk, which is still occupied by Russian forces. Their mission was to build a fortification at Vysoka Hora ahead of the approaching Ukrainian army. That’s where the group was attacked by Russian militants.
“They got us from behind, we were upland, an easy target,” Yaremchuk explains. The enemy’s tanks were shooting from the woods, so it was unclear how many were there, while Yaremchuk’s brigade had only two tanks and some dozen soldiers to guard the builders. And one of the tanks appeared to be broken, the soldier says.
Yaremchuk was wounded by shrapnel and evacuated by his comrades when the shelling ended. Not all survived the clash, though. “One of ours was burnt alive just a few meters from me,” Yaremchuk says. “I was already injured, saw others hurrying to him to extinguish the fire, but there was no one to save already.”
For his whole life Yaremchuk worked as a heavy truck driver at a quarry in Zhytomyr Oblast and says he still hopes to fully recover to get back to work. He has a family to support. “My wife is a school teacher and my daughter is a second-year pupil,” the soldier says.
Even though Yaremchuk has Russian origins and has a sister married to a Russian, he never doubted which side to fight for.
“His sister was ambivalent, because of all that propaganda, but when he got injured and told his war stories she started believing and convincing everyone she knows in Russia,” laughs Anna Yaremchuk and steps forward to fix her hero’s pillow.
To transfer money to help Yaremchuk and his family, please use the following card number.
PrivatBank Card
Andriy Yaremchuk
5168757260991718
