Five Ukrainian soldiers reflect on whether the battle for Bakhmut was worth the sacrifices they made. Here are their stories.
LVIV, Ukraine — A Buddhist chef was sent to Bakhmut to cook for soldiers on the front line and ended up joining the men in the trenches instead, losing nearly all his hearing when a drone crashed into his chest.
They arrived in the eastern city — some with limited training — and faced off against a ferocious army of Russian mercenaries and soldiers. They left with life-altering injuries. The lower part of his leg was amputated. He spent three months in bed recovering from shrapnel injuries in his backside. It would take more than nine months for him to begin to learn to walk again with a prosthetic leg.“It was a meat grinder for both sides,” he said. “Frankly speaking, at some point we were fighting for what, ruins? There was no city left.”
Then Russian troops invaded his country, and he was sent to Bakhmut as a chef, cooking borscht for soldiers. But as his unit lost more and more men his commanders asked if he could join the trenches. He agreed. On Jan. 3, his unit was told to pull out of their position in a village nearby. As they retreated, a shell fell just in front of him. He looked down and saw that his hand was gone. He was missing one leg, and the other was badly mangled. Two soldiers helped search for his leg and arm, but Kryvenko shouted to them: “Just get me out of here!” The men carried him for more than a mile under Russian shelling.Doctors told his mother that there was a 50 percent chance he would not survive surgery.
At one point, when the Russians tried to capture a small village outside Bakhmut, Ustymenko found himself in gun battles with Russian mercenaries over control of a single house — fighting from across a bedroom.When a new rotation of soldiers finally arrived, Ustymenko — whose call sign was “Fox” — was showing them their positions and moving to a bunker close by when a Russian rocket exploded just a foot away from his leg. After a grueling operation, he hopes to get fitted for a prosthetic leg.
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