‘The impossible’: Ukraine’s secret, deadly rescue missions
KYIV, Ukraine — As was his habit before each flight, the veteran Ukrainian army pilot ran a hand along the fuselage of his Mi-8 helicopter, caressing the heavy transporter’s metal skin to bring luck to him and his crew.
They would need it. Their destination — a besieged steel mill in the brutalized city of Mariupol — was a death trap. Some other crews didn’t make it back alive.
Still, the mission was vital, even desperate. Ukrainian troops were pinned down, their supplies running low, their dead and injured stacking up. Their last-ditch stand at the Azovstal mill was a growing symbol of Ukraine’s defiance in the war against Russia. They could not be allowed to perish.
The 51-year-old pilot — identified only by his first name, Oleksandr — flew just the one mission to Mariupol, and he considered it the most difficult flight of his 30-year-career. He took the risk, he said, because he didn’t want the Azovstal fighters to feel forgotten.
In the charred hellscape of that plant, in an underground bunker-turned-medical station that provided shelter from death and destruction above, word started reaching the wounded that a miracle might be coming. Among those told that he was on the list for evacuation was a junior sergeant who’d been shredded by mortar rounds, butchering his left leg and forcing its amputation above the knee.
“Buffalo” was his nom de guerre. He had been through so much, but one more deadly challenge loomed: escape from Azovstal.
A series of clandestine, against-the-odds, terrain-hugging, high-speed helicopter missions to reach the Azovstal defenders in March, April and May are being celebrated in Ukraine as among the most heroic feats of military derring-do of the fourmonth war. Some ended in catastrophe; each grew progressively riskier as Russian air defense batteries caught on.
The full story of the seven resupply and rescue missions has yet to be told. But from exclusive interviews with two wounded survivors; a military intelligence officer who flew on the first mission; and pilot interviews provided by the Ukrainian army, The Associated Press has pieced together the account of one of the last flights, from the perspective of both the rescuers and the rescued.
Only after more than 2,500 defenders who remained in the Azovstal ruins had started surrendering did Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy first give wind of the missions and their deadly cost.
The Azovstal fighters’ tenacity had frustrated Moscow’s objective of quickly capturing Mariupol and prevented Russian troops there from being
redeployed elsewhere. Zelenskyy told Ukrainian broadcaster ICTV that pilots braved “powerful” Russian air defenses in venturing beyond enemy lines, flying in food, water, medicine and weapons so the plant’s defenders could fight on, and flying out the injured.
The military intelligence officer said one helicopter was shot down and two others never came back, and are considered missing. He said he dressed in civilian clothes for his flight, thinking that he could melt into the population if he survived a crash: “We were aware it could be a one-way ticket.”
Said Zelenskyy: “These are absolutely heroic people who knew what was difficult, who knew that it was almost impossible . ... We lost a lot of pilots.”
If Buffalo had his way, he would not have lived to be evacuated. His life would have ended quickly, to spare him the agony he suffered after 120mm mortar rounds tore apart his left leg, bloodied his right foot, and peppered his back with shrapnel during street fighting in Mariupol on March 23.
The 20-year-old spoke to The Associated Press on condition that he not be identified by name, saying he didn’t want it to seem that he is seeking publicity when thousands of Azovstal defenders are in captivity or dead. He had been on the trail of a Russian tank, aiming to destroy it with his shoulder-launched, armor-piercing NLAW missile on the last day of the invasion’s first month, when his war was cut short.
Tossed next to the wreckage of a burning car, he dragged himself to cover in a nearby building and “decided it would be better to crawl into the basement and quietly die there,” he said.
But his friends evacuated him to the Ilyich steel mill, which subsequently fell in mid-April as Russian forces were tightening their grip on Mariupol and its strategic port on the Sea of Azov. Three days passed before medics were able to amputate, in a basement bomb shelter. He considers himself lucky: Doctors still had anesthetic when his turn came to go under the knife.
When he came around, a nurse told him how sorry she was that he’d lost the limb.