41 days in a bunker: How a battle raged on Ukraine's bloody front line
OUTSIDE AVDIIVKA, EASTERN UKRAINE >> The two Ukrainian soldiers were trapped. After repelling waves of Russian attempts to storm their small bunker in a cellar near an abandoned house, the enemy was on top of them.
“They surrounded us and started throwing grenades,” said Pvt. Vladyslav Molodykh, 39, whose call sign is Hammer. “They were shouting, `Surrender and you'll live.' There was no point in surrendering because they would have torn me apart.”
It was about 10 a.m. on Dec. 14.
Molodykh would emerge from the freezing, cramped cellar 41 harrowing days later — alone but alive.
The battle for the bunker in Avdiivka, in eastern Ukraine, was only a small part of one of dozens of clashes raging along a 600mile front. But it highlights how hard it is to both defend and attack in a war increasingly fought in bloody, close-quarter combat, with Ukrainian forces running low on shells and Russia seeking to barrel forward with brute force.
A member of the 71st Jager Brigade, Molodykh recounted his story from a hospital bed where he was recovering from frostbite and other injuries. His account was supported by his commander, the soldiers who rescued him, medics who treated him and unedited drone footage viewed by The New York Times.
Molodykh, a divorced father of two, joined the army as a volunteer six months before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. By the time he was deployed late last year to Avdiivka, the scene of months of fierce fighting, he was no stranger to the “zero line,” where the enemy can be fewer than 100 feet away and drones are a constant threat.
On Dec. 13, Molodykh and three other soldiers were deployed to a position at an abandoned house in the south of Avdiivka that had a nearby root cellar, normally used for keeping vegetables and other food in the winter. It was in that cellar, a two-room space without windows and with access to the house only via a narrow tunnel, where the soldiers would engage in a desperate fight for survival.
Taking a bunker — even one that is only minimally fortified, like the cellar — is bloody work. While Russia has stepped up aerial bombing to ravage Ukrainian fortifications, it needs the infantry to storm positions like bunkers, where defenders have the advantage.
The house where Molodykh was stationed was being used by Ukrainian forces as an observation post, and they had established fortified firing positions there to target Russian forces moving in their direction. They also had firing positions inside the bunker.
But when Molodykh and his unit arrived at the site, the area had been blanketed with a thick fog for days, allowing Russian forces to approach undetected.
They attacked the morning after. “We repelled the first assault immediately,” Molodykh said.
Thinking they had time to rest, one of the soldiers, Pvt. Ihor Tretiak, 38, whose call sign is Terminator, went to the bunker to warm his feet and Molodykh joined him to make tea. The two other members of the team, who stayed outside, suddenly raised the alarm.
The snow-covered streets around the house erupted in a storm of bullets and grenades. The two privates said they had been pinned down in the bunker, firing back at about 15 to 20 Russian attackers. One Russian soldier who charged the bunker was shot dead by Molodykh, and he tumbled down into the tunnel entrance, they said.
The two men in the bunker said they heard one of their comrades outside begging for his life after he had been captured by Russian soldiers.
“`Don't shoot. I want to live,'” Tretiak, speaking in another hospital, where he was recuperating, said he heard the Ukrainian soldier saying. “But they just shot him, and I understood that I wouldn't surrender.”
Both soldiers outside the bunker were killed in the fighting Dec. 14, and for the next three days, Molodykh and Tretiak held off the attackers. Tretiak, with shrapnel wounds in both legs from grenade explosions and his right hand ripped apart by a bullet, reloaded magazines for his comrade.
On the fourth day, the abandoned house was blown up, blocking the entrance to the cellar and trapping the two Ukrainian soldiers.
“The Russians completely buried it to prevent us from getting out,” Molodykh said.