Kyiv, Ukraine (AP) – As was his habit before each flight, a veteran Ukrainian army pilot ran his hand along the fuselage of his Mi-8 helicopter, stroking the metal skin of the heavy transporter to bring good luck to him and his crew.
They would need it. Their destination – the besieged steel factory in the brutal city of Mariupol – was a deadly trap. Some other crews did not return alive.
Still, the mission was vital, even desperate. Ukrainian troops were pressed, their supplies depleted, and the dead and wounded piled up. Their latest stand at the Azovstal plant was a growing symbol of Ukraine’s disobedience in the war against Russia. They could not be allowed to die.
The 51-year-old pilot, identified only by his first name, Alexander, flew only one mission to Mariupol and he considers it the most difficult flight in his 30-year career. He took the risk, he said, because he did not want Azovstal’s fighters to feel forgotten.
In the charred hellish landscape of this plant, in an underground bunker turned into a medical station that provided shelter from death and destruction from above, the news began to reach the wounded that a miracle could come. Among those told he was on the evacuation list was a junior sergeant who was torn apart by mortars, slaughtered his left leg and forced his amputation above the knee.
“Buffalo” was his nickname. He had been through so much, but another deadly challenge lay ahead: escaping Azovstal.
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Ukraine is celebrating a series of high-speed helicopter helicopter missions to reach Azov’s defenders in March, April and May as one of the most heroic feats of military concessions in the four-month war. Some ended in disaster; each became more and more risky as Russian air defense batteries caught on.
The full story of the seven supply and rescue missions has not yet been told. But from exclusive interviews with two survivors; a military intelligence officer who flew the first mission; and interviews with pilots provided by the Ukrainian military, the Associated Press has compiled the story of one of the last flights from the perspective of both rescuers and rescuers.
It was only after more than 2,500 defenders left in the ruins of Azovstal began to surrender that Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky first announced the missions and their deadly cost.
The tenacity of Azovstal’s fighters thwarted Moscow’s goal of quickly capturing Mariupol and preventing Russian troops from being redeployed elsewhere. Zelensky told Ukrainian television station ICTV that the pilots had taken courage in Russia’s “powerful” air defenses by going beyond enemy lines, flying with food, water, medicine and weapons to help the plant’s defenders fight and throw them away. the wounded.
The military intelligence officer said one helicopter had been shot down and two others had never returned and were thought to be missing. He said he was wearing civilian clothes for his flight, thinking he could melt into the population if he survived a crash: “We knew it could be a one-way ticket.”
Zelenski said: “These are absolutely heroic people who knew what was difficult, who knew it was almost impossible. … We lost a lot of pilots. ”
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If Buffalo had acted in his own way, he would not have lived to be evacuated. His life would end quickly to save him the agony he suffered after 120mm mortars tore his left leg, bled his right leg and hit him in the back with shrapnel during the March 23 tree battle in Mariupol.
The 20-year-old spoke to the Associated Press on condition that he would not be identified by name, saying he did not want to appear to be seeking publicity when thousands of Azovstal defenders were captured or dead. He was on the trail of a Russian tank, aiming to destroy it with an NLAW armor-piercing missile fired from his shoulder on the last day of the first month of the invasion, when his war was called off.
Thrown to the wreckage of a burning car, he dragged himself to hide in a nearby building and “decided it was better to crawl into the basement and die quietly there,” he said.
But his friends evacuated him to Ilyich’s steel plant, which later collapsed in mid-April as Russian forces tightened their grip on Mariupol and its strategic port on the Sea of Azov. It took three days before medics were able to amputate him in a basement bomb shelter. He is considered lucky: the doctors were still under anesthesia when it was his turn to go under the knife.
When he arrived, a nurse told him how sorry he was to have lost his limb.
He ended the embarrassment with a joke: “Will they return the money for 10 tattoos?”
“I had a lot of tattoos on my leg,” he said. One remains, a human figure, but her legs are gone.
After the operation, he was transferred to the Azovstal plant. A fortress covering almost 11 square kilometers (more than 4 miles), with a 24-kilometer (15 miles) maze of underground tunnels and bunkers, the plant was virtually impregnable.
But conditions were bleak.
“There was constant shelling,” said Vladislav Zagorodniy, a 22-year-old corporal who was shot in the pelvis, tearing at a nerve during street fighting in Mariupol.
Evacuated to Azovstal, he meets Buffalo there. They already knew each other: they were both from Chernigov, a city in the north, surrounded and defeated by Russian forces.
Zagorodny saw the missing leg. He asked Buffalo how he was.
“It’s all right, we’re going to clubs soon,” Buffalo said.
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Zagorodny was evacuated from Azovstal by helicopter on March 31 after three failed attempts.
This was his first helicopter flight. The Mi-8 caught fire on the way out, killing one of its engines. The other kept them in the air for the rest of the 80-minute early morning run to the Dnieper town on the Dnieper River in central Ukraine.
He will mark his release with a mortar tattoo on his right forearm: “I did it so I don’t forget,” he said.
Next week it was Buffalo’s turn. He was ambiguous about leaving. On the one hand, he was relieved that his share of the dwindling food and water would now go to others who could still fight; on the other, “there was a painful feeling. They stayed there, and I left them. “
However, he almost missed his flight.
The soldiers pulled him out of his deep bunker in a cart and loaded him on board a truck, which rushed to the pre-arranged landing area. The soldiers wrapped him in a jacket.
The helicopter’s ammunition cargo was unloaded first. The wounded were then taken on board.
But not Buffalo. Left in the back corner of the truck, he was somehow overlooked. He couldn’t be alarmed because the mortar blasts had hurt his throat, and he was still too hoarse to hear the helicopter’s rotor-pee.
I thought, “Well, not today,” he recalls. “And suddenly someone shouted, ‘You forgot the soldier in the truck!’
As the cargo compartment was full, the Buffalo was placed transversely to the others, which were loaded on board next to each other. A member of the crew took his hand and told him not to worry, they would go home.
“All my life,” he told the crew member, “I dreamed of flying a helicopter. It doesn’t matter if we arrive – my dream has come true. ”
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In his cockpit, the wait seemed endless to Alexander, the minutes seemed like hours.
“Very scary,” he said. “You see explosions around and the next projectile can reach your location.”
In the fog of war and with the full picture of the secret missions still emerging, it is impossible to be absolutely sure that Buffalo and the pilot who spoke to reporters in a video interview recorded and shared by the military were on board. the same flight. But the details of their accounts match.
Both gave the same date: the night of April 4-5. Alexander remembers that he was fired upon by a ship as they floated over the waters of Mariupol. An explosive wave tossed the helicopter “like a toy,” he said. But his escape maneuvers got them out of trouble.
Buffalo also remembers the explosion. The evacuees were later told that the pilot had avoided a missile.
Alexander fired the helicopter up to 220 kilometers (135 miles) per hour and flew up to 3 meters (9 feet) above the ground – except when jumping over power lines. A second helicopter on his mission never returned; on the return flight, the pilot told him on the radio that he was running out of fuel. This was their last communication.
In his cart, Buffalo had watched the terrain pass through a porthole. “We flew over the fields, under the trees. “Very low,” he said.
They reached the Dnieper safely. As he landed, Alexander heard the wounded shouting at the pilots. He expected them to shout at him for throwing them so violently during the flight.
“But when I opened the door, I heard boys say ‘Thank you,'” he said.
“Everyone applauded,” recalls Buffalo, who is now undergoing rehabilitation with Zagorodny at a clinic in Kyiv. “We told the pilots they did the impossible.”
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AP journalists Sofiko Megrelidze in Tbilisi, Georgia, and Alexander Stashevsky in Kyiv.
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