Escape from Debaltseve: Ukraine’s soldiers tell how they got out alive

Their chief commander President Petro Poroshenko claimed that he personally
gave an order to soldiers to retreat the night before, on Feb. 17.
But soldiers said they were leaving anyway.

“If we stayed there it would definitely be either captivity or death,”
Yuriy Prekharia, first lieutenant of the 40th Brigade, told the Kyiv
Post.

Prekharia, 37, who served by the village of Novohryhorivka just north of
Debaltseve, said the decision to leave was taken by the officers on
the ground, in coordination with units nearby. They waited until all
the Ukrainian troops in Debaltseve were prepared to leave their
positions along with them, and started moving at night.

Prekharia led his 50 soldiers on foot through the fields and forests along a
secret way, bypassing the redoubts of separatists and mines. “We
walked some 20 kilometers on foot and now the guys can hardly walk,”
he said. A big military map was sticking out of his combat belt.

This way Prekharia, who worked as a financial analyst in Dnipropetrovsk
city before being drafted to the army, saved his entire unit. None of
his men were injured or killed on the way. They reached the village
of Luhanske at about 4:40 a.m. The village continues to serve as a
meeting point for the troops that have been coming out of Debaltseve
all day.

But way too many soldiers were less lucky than his men. In his televised
speech, Poroshenko said there were about 30 people wounded out of
more than 2,000 troops leaving the area of Debaltseve. Dozens of dead
bodies were reportedly brought to the morgue in Artemivsk, medics
said. Empty coffins were piled up by its entrance door of the morgue.

Albert Sardarian, a combat medic of the National Guard who also managed to
leave Debaltseve, said that the armored vehicles and some 1,000
troops were ambushed a few times along the way. At about 7:30 a.m.
they saw four tanks at the heights by the road.

“Initially we thought they were ours, but suddenly the tanks started shooting at
us and the mortars followed them from the side,” Sardarian said.
His car was also shot at. “A rocket landed on the car that
overtook us,” he said.

Then
a fight broke out. Sardarian, 22, who studied law in Warsaw before
being drafted to military service, said that Feb. 18 was the first
time when he had to shoot at other people. Six soldiers were
seriously wounded in the fight.

Sardarian
said that he along with other medics gave them first aid but had to
leave them on the ground, hoping the following armored vehicles would
pick them up. “The rest of the way we walked on foot because our
car was totally broken,” Sardarian said.

Sardarian
said that when he served in Debaltseve he saw about a dozen soldiers
killed over the last two weeks. Many wounded died because there were
no way to take them to the hospital though the encirclement of the
separatist and Russian troops.

The
soldiers who left Debaltseve, say they had some hopes that the peace
deal signed in Minsk on Feb. 12 would stop the fights. But instead
they saw that it allowed Russian-backed separatists and Russian
troops to reinforce before the next strike.

Prekharia,
who served near Debaltseve since late December, said that around
January 20 it became clear that it was the Russian regular troops
fighting in the area now, not some local rogues. “We saw that it
was professionals working because they were precise in shelling and
well-coordinated,” he said. “I remember this style since
Ilovaisk.” The city of Ilovaisk became a deadly trap for thousands
of Ukrainian soldiers in August and September. This was the first
time when Russian regular troops were reported on massive scale
fighting on Ukraine’s territory.

“We
were waiting for truce, we thought it would end the war. Instead they
consolidated forces to attack again,” said Maksym Tymochko, 22, a
junior lieutenant who also served in the 40^th brigade.
Tymochko said he had to change five cars on his way out of Debaltseve
because they kept getting destroyed. He took part in the fights
alongside the soldiers of the National Guard.

Poroshenko
said that soldiers of 128^th, 25^th,
30^th brigade, fighters of special forces and some
policemen managed to leave the Debaltseve area. He said it was 80
percent of troops that were sent to the area.

“We
preserved a base for defending the country. This is a persuasive
proof of the defense potential of the army and the effectiveness of
the military command,” Poroshenko said before leaving to the east
in order to personally greet the soldiers who left Debaltseve.

But
the soldiers are angry because they say they had actually been told
to stay put, and effectively left to die in a trap. Prekharia, who
had survived the Ilovaisk massacre in late August, said that the head
of General Staff Viktor Muzhenko simply repeated the mistake,
allowing an encirclement to happen once again, which claimed hundreds
of lives.

“In
Ilovaisk we could believe Mr. Muzhenko, who said that the Russian
troops abruptly showed up there. But In Debaltseve, we can’t trust
him anymore. It was obvious that the military commanders failed in
their job,” Prekharia said. “The
commanders should have given the order to break through and retreat
as soon as the threat of encirclement became obvious.”

Kyiv
Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached
at [email protected]

Editor’s Note: This article has been produced with support fromwww.mymedia.org.ua, funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark and implemented by a joint venture between NIRAS and BBC Media Action. Content is independent of the donor.