A story about a medic who continued to perform his duty and save his comrades even when he was mentally saying goodbye to life.
A lean, red-haired man with a sincere smile, but a distant look, as if still wandering somewhere out there, on the front line. The left hand is covered, as if hidden from the inquisitive eyes of those around him, by a black glove — a complex operation is still ahead for the fingers to fully restore their function.
He is bright, sincere, but at the same time as if already distant from us — civilians. This is “Znakhar” — a combat medic from the General Kulchytskyi Battalion of the “Bureviy” Brigade, a volunteer, Kyiv resident Ivan M., 39 years old. He fought for 469 days until he was severely wounded near Luhansk.
“It was a beautiful summer day, an incredibly clear blue sky and bright green colors of the grass. And I thought: ‘A wonderful day to die!’” — this is how Ivan begins his story. That day, shrapnel pierced his lung and arm. He lay under a birch tree, lost consciousness several times, but each time he came to, he admired the sky in greedy snatches and listened to the birds singing, for it could have been the last miracle in his life.
In his delirium, he recalled a childhood memory: when he was about five or six years old, he was walking with his mother from the market. The woman was hurrying, lost in her thoughts, while he, a little boy, trailed behind as best he could. And suddenly he saw a white cloud in the sky — in the shape of a little angel.
“Of course I started tugging at my mother’s skirt and insisted that she also look up,” – Ivan says with a smile. They stopped, looked at the miracle together, even a stranger running past raised his head. “First time I’ve seen people in the city stop just to look at the sky,” — he wondered. But for the two of them, this comment only made them laugh.
On the day of his injury, Ivan again saw a similar cloud in the sky and thought: ‘A wonderful day to die.’ But the memory of his mother and the realization that he had to save his brothers-in-arms got him to his feet. Despite his own bleeding, he managed to pull out two more guys from his unit.
He recalls: it’s always scary at the front, especially at first. The most terrifying memory in Ivan’s mind remains the intense shelling that lasted over an hour. Constant direct hits felt like the coordinated strikes of a predator. At first, his brain froze, and then in despair, it switched to a mode of strange laughter. Because every explosion was associated for him with the way a neighbor in the yard would beat an old carpet. The volume was dozens of times louder, the ground shook, and the wave hit his legs. Ivan turned on the recording on his phone — on the video, of course, nothing can be seen, but a continuous roar can be heard. As if someone was pouring wheat for chickens onto the ground. Not a single minute of silence.
After the shelling, they didn’t come out of the shelter for a long time, almost ‘buried’ in the ground waiting for permission. And when they finally got up, they were horrified: the deep trench had turned into a knee-high ditch, all around — a field as if passed through a giant meat grinder. The bodies of brothers-in-arms who didn’t manage to run to the ‘burrow’ lay under the open sky. Ivan, together with others, collected the fallen — some were recognized only by their clothes or shoes.
‘A dead body is too heavy, but we couldn’t leave any of ours there, alone,’ — he says. The most terrifying thing was hearing the crunching of bones during the dragging. ‘I understood that the dead don’t feel pain, but I still asked them for forgiveness’.
Today, Ivan is still in rehabilitation. He speaks with gratitude about the opportunities for recovery abroad, but adds: there is a lack of information about this for the wounded, he personally was just lucky. And for civilians who face fear every day during air raids, he advises to remember:
«If we are still alive, it means our mission is not yet complete. We must live on, fight and see the best in every moment. To learn to feel life and enjoy it while we have the opportunity».
Listening to him, you understand: even in the darkest moments, a person can be sustained by memories of childhood, love for their closest ones and responsibility toward their brothers-in-arms. The story of «Znakhar» is not only about pain and fear, but also about the strength that helps one live on, and about the belief that every new day is a chance to live it with dignity.
The material was prepared by Svitlana Kosenko within the framework of the advanced school «Truth Through Stories», implemented with the support of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).