Ready to die, but not to surrender
Ukrainian soldier recounts plan for survival, escape
KYIV — After seven days hiding in a dank and dark tunnel deep in the bowels of the sprawling Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol as the city burned around him, Private Oleksandr Ivantsov was on the verge of collapse.
President Volodymyr Zelensky had ordered Ukrainian soldiers to lay down their weapons after 80 days of resistance and surrender. But Ivantsov had other ideas.
“When I signed up for this mission, I realized that most likely I would die,” he recalled. “I was ready to die in battle, but morally I was not ready to surrender.”
He knew his plan might sound a little crazy, but at the time, he was convinced he had a better chance of surviving by hiding out than by surrendering himself to Russians, whose widespread abuse of prisoners of war was well known to Ukrainian troops.
So he knocked a hole in a wall to get to a small tunnel, stashed some supplies, and made plans to stay hidden for 10 days, hoping that the Russians who had taken control of the ruined plant would let down their guard by then, allowing him to creep through the ruins unnoticed and make his way into the city he once called home.
But after a week, he had gone through the six cans of stewed chicken and 10 cans of sardines and almost all of the eight 1.5 liter bottles of water he had secreted away.
“I felt very bad, I was dehydrated, and my thoughts were getting confused,” he said. “I realized that I had to leave because I could not live there for three more days.”
Ivantsov’s account of his escape from Azovstal is supported by photographs and videos from the city and factory that he shared with The New York Times. It was verified by superior officers and by medical records documenting his treatment after he made it to Ukrainian-controlled territory. Still, his tale seemed so far-fetched that Ukraine’s security services made him take a polygraph test to assure them he was not a double agent.
Ivantsov is still fighting for Ukraine, helping a drone unit outside the pulverized city of Bakhmut, where he recalled his story one sunny afternoon. He told it reluctantly, saying he could not share certain details in order to protect the Ukrainian soldiers from Azovstal still being held as prisoners of war and the civilians in the occupied territories who aided in his escape.
Ivantsov, 28, was thousands of miles from Ukraine when Russia began its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, working as a maritime security agent assigned to protect ships from Somali pirates on the Gulf of Aden near the Red Sea.
He had lived in Mariupol for eight years, he said, when it was a city on the rise. “They were making roads, parks, an ice palace, swimming pools, gyms,” he said. On March 14, he enlisted in the Azov regiment, a former far-right militia group that had been folded into the Ukrainian military and was leading the defense of the Azovstal plant.
By then, the battle for Mariupol was already securing its place as among the most savage of the war. As the Russians blasted the city into oblivion, thousands of civilians and soldiers barricaded themselves inside the elaborate network of bunkers under the plant, a complex about twice as large as midtown Manhattan.
And every day, the Russian noose around Azovstal was tightening.
On May 16, after it was clear that the Ukrainian soldiers were no longer an effective fighting force, Zelensky ordered them to surrender.
It would take four days to complete the process, giving Ivantsov plenty of time to reconsider his plan. But his mind was made up.
“I told everyone about my decision, and before they left, I shook hands with each of them,” he said of his compatriots, 700 of whom remain in Russian captivity. “Those who had money gave me money.”
On May 20, 2022, the last Ukrainian soldier surrendered and Ivantsov went into hiding in the tunnel. In addition to the food and water he had stashed, he had some coffee, tea, and sugar, as well as a mattress and a sleeping bag.
By the seventh day, running low on water, he knew he had to leave. He changed into civilian clothes, ditched his weapons and ventured out into the factory grounds. Looking up at the sky for the first time in days, he said, he was struck by the brilliance of the stars.
It took six hours, he said, and the sun was rising when he made it into the ruined city. It was hard to put what he saw into words.
“I saw animal bodies, human bodies,” he said. “There were pieces of bodies. An arm could be lying around, a dog could be pulling it somewhere.”
Making it out of Azovstal was only the first step.
Reaching the front would take him 18 days, crossing about 125 miles behind enemy lines.