Editor’s Note: In early August 2014, after pushing Russian-led forces out of many of the towns they had seized since April, Ukrainian forces were worn out and had become spread dangerously thin across hundreds of miles of territory in the Donbas. After successfully liberating Popasna and Lysychansk in Luhansk Oblast, the next target was Ilovaisk — a strategic railway junction — located 30 kilometers east of the Russian-led forces’ stronghold of Donetsk.
The General Staff’s 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 Ilovaisk, and that they were poorly armed.
With regular Ukrainian army units spread around the city from the west — in the villages of Grabske and Mnohopillya, a farming hamlet 10 kilometers to the south — the offensive on the city itself was left to volunteer units to carry out. After several failed attempts, the volunteer units managed to enter the city on Aug. 18, but got bogged down in fighting at the railway line that bisects the city. Waiting for reinforcements that never arrived, the volunteer fighters were on Aug. 24–26 surrounded by thousands of Russian regular troops who had crossed the border into Ukraine secretly.
After days of fighting, Russian and Ukrainian commanders agreed that Ukrainian forces would be allowed to withdraw from the city in two columns early on Aug. 29. But soon after the columns set off, they came under attack by the Russians. Hundreds of Ukrainians, and an unknown number of Russian troops, were killed in the ambush and ensuing fighting.
The Kyiv Post, with support from the Journalism Development Network and in partnership with internet magazine Spektr.press, carried out a series of interviews with Ukrainian soldiers caught up in the fighting. In the first of these interviews, Medic Vsevolod Stebliuk and army air force pilot Vladyslav Voloshyn describe how they managed to escape Russian encirclement, and survive Iloviask.
SCENE: Aug. 30, 2014, on the outskirts of the town of Starobesheve, Donetsk Oblast
Vladyslav Voloshyn woke up in an abandoned private house in the outskirts of the town of Starobesheve southeast of Donetsk feeling perplexed. He could barely remember how much time he’d spent there after his low-flying Su‑25 ground attack jet was downed by Russian-led forces at noon on Aug. 29.
He knew he was alone in the middle of a town held by enemy forces. But Voloshyn, a pilot of the 299th Tactical Aviation Brigade, a formation of the Ukrainian Air Force, wasn’t easily scared. Rolling on the floor of the ruined house writhing with pain, he forced himself to go over all that had happened to him earlier.
Challenging assignment
In late August, Voloshyn was at Dnipro city airport when he was told to fly two Su‑25s to Kramatorsk airport base, which had come back under the control of the Ukrainian army. After completing the task, Voloshyn’s team also destroyed a group of fighters of the Russian-backed warlord Aleksey Mozgovoi in Alchevsk, and was ready to fly back to Dnipro.
But the commanders were silent. Waiting impatiently, Voloshyn suddenly heard early on Aug. 29 that he had been ordered to meet with Major-General Viktor Nazarov.
“We didn’t know what was going on in Ilovaisk at that point,” Voloshyn said. “There wasn’t even any electricity (in Kramatorsk).”
Nazarov told Voloshyn that the pilots had to help encircled Ukrainian soldiers break out of the besieged town of Ilovaisk in two military columns, but warned there was a high possibility of being shot down.
But Voloshyn didn’t hesitate for a moment. His mission was to carry out an air-to-ground missile strike on an enemy base in the Ilovaisk-Kuteinikovo area.
“We didn’t have accurate coordinates for the enemy’s antiaircraft defenses, but I did some quick calculations based on the reconnaissance team’s report, and we went ahead,” Voloshyn explained.
Hitting the ground
Voloshyn led a combat sortie of two Su‑25s on the morning of Aug. 29. He and the pilot of the other plane had just destroyed some Russian-led forces’ heavy armor and a couple of military trucks near Starobesheve (about 26 kilometers south-southeast of the city of Donetsk) when he was nearly blinded by a flash of light in his cockpit.
After a moment, Voloshyn realized that his aircraft had been hit. His plane flipped over in the air and started losing altitude with every second.
He knew he had to eject but had little hope he could survive that – he was flying so low in a flipped-over plane that ejection could throw him into the ground. “I was flying at an extremely low altitude due to the difficulty of the mission. When the plane was hit, I was probably only 30 meters above the ground. I hesitated for a couple of seconds because while ejecting my pilot’s seat would be blasted about 80 meters into the air.”
Voloshyn managed to right the plane and eject. He landed on a hill and immediately started looking for shelter when he saw a trench. His right arm was broken and his back was injured, but he decided not stay in the trench for too long, and started moving towards a forest, all the while under constant shelling.
“I wasn’t scared (when it had happened). A person who has almost accepted his death can’t be scared anymore,” Voloshyn said. “However, from that moment, I felt that a piece of me had died there… I was ready to die when my plane turned 180 degrees in the air.”
Voloshyn waited for two hours in the forest, which is located on the Kalmius river, when he suddenly saw another pair of Su‑25s. “I thought: ‘Why on earth are they flying at the exact same spot where I was hit,’” Voloshyn said. “As it turned out later, they didn’t know what had happened to me.”
When the shelling stopped, Voloshyn proceeded to the northern outskirts of Starobesheve. He felt dizzy.
“I ate some leaves, but I wasn’t really hungry because of the shock,” Voloshyn explained.
He found a ruined house with some civilian clothes and buried his military uniform and documents in the garden nearby so that no one could identify him as a soldier.
Voloshyn turned on his old phone — the battery life would be enough for a couple of calls. He called his wife and asked her to pass information about him on to his fellows. Exhausted, he fell asleep inside the house.
Late on Aug. 29, he turned on his phone again and saw a message from a person in his unit with the nom-de-guerre Nebo (Sky). A glimmer of hope warmed his heart as he read detailed instructions from Nebo about how he should meet up with a Ukrainian medical column that would be traveling from Novy Svit, a village nine kilometers north of Starobeshevo, to a makeshift military hospital.
Escape
But the next day there were no messages from Nebo. On the Aug. 31, Voloshyn arrived at a crossroads — the earlier agreed meeting point — only to see the column passing him on their way from Novy Svit to Rozdolne. He had no chance to stop it and join it as Russian-led forces were patrolling the district and he would have given himself away.
“That was the moment when my hope almost vanished,” Voloshyn said. He was left in Starobesheve, where he saw other Ukrainian soldiers disguised as civilians. A second attempt to evacuate him failed as well because of a misunderstanding with the negotiator.
He understood it might be too dangerous to wait for help another day, and decided to leave the Russian-held Starobeshevo before dawn on Sept. 2. He walked through the town without seeing a single person. But while walking through a sunflower field, Voloshyn noticed a checkpoint manned by Russian-led fighters.
“I noticed the checkpoint some 150 meters before getting to it, it was too late to turn away,” he said. He could see at least three people. All of them pointed their guns at him and asked him where he was going. The heavily-bearded men didn’t speak good Russian, according to Voloshyn. He told them he was on his way to Rozdolne to visit his relatives.
“They only kept asking me about my right hand, which I kept in my pocket for the whole time because it was swollen,” he said, adding that he told them it had been badly wounded as a result of shelling on the 29th.
Voloshyn was certain he managed to convince the separatists he was a civilian because of his “good Russian accent” as he was a native of Luhansk Oblast. Two hours after he reached Rozdolne, he finally saw the airborne armored infantry fighting vehicle that had been supposed to be a meeting point.
Four days after his plane was hit, Voloshyn was finally reunited with Ukrainian forces. He was flown for treatment in Kramatorsk on a jet sent personally by Chief of the Ukrainian General Staff Viktor Muzhenko.
“The first thing I did when I arrived at hospital was to burn all those civilian clothes and the phone I used while getting out of Starobesheve,” Voloshyn said.
On March 18, 2018 — almost four years after the Ilovaisk operation — Ukrainian pilot Vladyslav Voloshyn shot himself in his apartment in the southern Ukrainian port city of Mykolaiv. He did not leave a suicide note. Mykolaiv city police have launched a homicide probe into Voloshyn’s death. Voloshyn, 29, leaves a wife and two children. Voloshyn was the youngest Ukrainian pilot to take part in the Ilovaisk operation — he was 25 years old at the time. This was his last interview.
