The Rescuers

The men of Ukraine's State Emergency Service dare to tread where paramedics do not, pulling survivors from horrific situations.

The ambulance speeds past birch trees as white as bone. Each pothole rattles the vehicle, each passing metre bringing it closer to the kill zone. Up front, strapped into body armour and a blue helmet, Igor Korzhov shouts into his radio: ‘What’s the address again?’

A sharp left. A slag heap comes into view, one of many that dot Ukraine’s embattled east. The front line is just behind it, growling with artillery fire as it has done all day, and all the months before.

‘What the fuck is the address?’ Igor shouts again.

A sharp right. Across a scrubland of leafless trees, pylons and ruined homes, the village comes into view. ‘49 Chernyshevsky Street,’ replies the dispatcher through a hiss of radio static.

The ambulance driver, Sasha Pavlenko, brakes hard outside a tin-roof cottage. ‘49 Chernyshevsky Street – where is it?’ he yells at a man carrying a bucket of coal, but he looks unsure; Sasha swears and drives on.

The property soon appears, destroyed by a Russian shell: windows blown out,roof caved in, a mangled ribcage of rafters. ‘There’s a woman in there,’ says a neighbour, as Igor and his fellow first responders rush in.

Air thick with dust, they clamber over twisted metal and splintered beams. Sasha runs round the back to smash open the window of a ground-floor, rubble-blocked bedroom. ‘She’s alive, I can hear her,’ says Igor.

The elderly woman is distraught and plastered in dust, but somehow the direct hit to her home has barely scratched her. As Sasha breaks the glass from the outside, Igor positions his body to protect her from the shards.

They lift her out of the window, her face contorted with anguish. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ says Igor. ‘The man behind you has got you.’

They put her in the ambulance with her middle-aged son. Speeding to hospital, Igor realises the man is severely wounded, so cuts open his jacket, then his woollen jumper, then his blood-stained shirt. Shrapnel has torn a horrifying gash through his upper arm, breaking the bone and severing an artery.

‘Fuck,’ says Igor. ‘It’s a big hole.’

Igor injects him with a painkiller while a colleague applies pressure to the wound. He’s lost a lot of blood, and he’s losing more. ‘It’s going to be OK,’ Igor assures. ‘Talk to me. Don’t close your eyes.’

The ambulance hurtles into Kostyantynivka, set back 20 miles from the battlefront, and pulls up to the hospital. The man is stretchered into the operating theatre. He will probably live, although now has no home to return to as winter approaches. But there isn’t time to dwell on that. Igor’s radio buzzes.

‘A five-storey building has been hit,’ says the dispatcher. ‘It’s on fire.’

‘Got it,’ he replies. ‘We’re on our way.’

***

Before Russia invaded Ukraine one year ago, igniting this relentless routine of daily horror, ruining communities and shattering lives, Igor and his colleagues were working as firemen. Based in Toretsk in the Donetsk region, war was nothing new to them.

During Russia’s first, covert invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014, Moscow-backed forces briefly seized this coal-mining town – a drab Soviet relic where many felt a closer affinity to Mother Russia than Europe-facing Kyiv. But after being retaken by the Ukrainian army a few months later, the town found itself near a front line that raged and smouldered over the next eight years.

Then, last February, Russia’s full-scale attack changed everything for these men of the 22nd Fire and Rescue Squad. They sent their loved ones hundreds of miles westwards to escape the onslaught, then stayed on to serve the war effort – not as soldiers, but as emergency workers.

Led by 33-year-old Oleksandr Storyev, the authoritative station chief, and 30-year-old Igor, his warm-hearted deputy, the past year has seen these men use their firefighting know-how to extinguish blaze after blaze under Russian bombardment. Their fire engines rumble past Toretsk’s grey rows of Soviet-era flats – some blown apart by shelling – to distribute aid and deliver water to residents cut off from the mains.

Each time a rocket destroys a residential building, the men are there in minutes – rescuing survivors, retrieving bodies, clearing rubble. And when their gruelling schedule allows, they’re out repairing damaged windows or inspecting unexploded weapons, removing what they can.

They have another new role. Joined by veteran fireman Sasha – a 50-year-old tough-guy joker built like an ageing boxer – the trio took a crash course in battlefield medicine and now drive their ambulance to the places the paramedics won’t go, treating and evacuating wounded civilians from the worst front-line hotspots.

Their ambulance’s blue lights are temperamental, its siren stopped working long ago, but when the call comes, they are the first on the scene.

These men have been battered by a punishing year, day in, day out, with no end in sight. In a way, they – and the thousands like them working nationwide for the State Emergency Service – are the Ukrainian version of Syria’s White Helmets, that celebrated humanitarian group who lead search and rescue operations in their war-torn, and recently earthquake-hit, country. In Ukraine, news reports are full of photos of these brave people at work, scrambling through the ruins of each new Russian attack.

I wanted to meet these unsung heroes in person.

Who were they and what did their lives look like back at base, away from the rolling news? What impact was the unremitting terror having on them and how long could they endure it? And could the answer to that question give me a sense of how the war might unfold?

So, towards the end of last year, my Ukrainian friend and producer, Vova Subotovskiy, helped me secure access to the fire brigade in Toretsk and I set off to make a short documentary about them for Channel 4 News. From London, I flew to Chișinău in Moldova, drove to its south-eastern border with Ukraine, crossed by foot, got a lift to Odesa, slept on a night train to Dnipro, rented a car to drive east with Vova and, two days after taking off from Stansted Airport, I found myself in this cold, overcast epicentre of Russia’s war on Ukraine – our arrival marked by the nightmarish snap, crackle and pop of a cluster bomb exploding nearby.

***

‘Good morning, is everyone here?’

It’s 8am and around 20 on-duty firemen line up outside their building, emblazoned with their motto, ‘Zapobihty. Vryatuvaty. Dopomohty’: ‘Prevent. Rescue. Help’. Shellfire is booming nearby, each bang and crump felt in the chest, but no one flinches.

‘I remind you again to inspect the vehicles,’ says chief Oleksandr, as the firemen’s two adopted stray dogs sniff around their boots. ‘Check everything. Everyone must have helmets and body armour. All vehicles must be ready for action.’

Bearded and bull-necked, Oleksandr has a steadfast, serious air that surrenders to carefree belly laughs when unwinding with his closest colleagues. That usually happens in their common room over card games and bowls of borsch. A fire engine-themed calendar hangs there, its date marker left on 23 February 2022 — the day before Russia invaded and life as they knew it was put on hold.

The rank-and-file firemen live around town and sleep in dorms downstairs during shifts. But Oleksandr, Igor and Sasha have made the base their home, sleeping upstairs in old offices – stark, shabby rooms transformed into mini jungles by houseplants entrusted to the firemen by fleeing locals. Oleksandr and Igor’s actual homes are in nearby Bakhmut, devastated by Russia’s months-long assault.

‘That beautiful town where I used to live has been razed to the ground,’ says Igor. Ukrainian positions around Toretsk have generally held, though Russian forces make creeping advances.

Outside, the morning briefing ends. ‘At ease, report for duty,’ says Oleksandr before heading upstairs for a sausage-stuffed omelette, washed down with sugary coffee. He’s a country boy at heart, raised in a Donbas village where his parents kept cows, geese, pigs and sheep. When young, sports-mad Oleksandr wasn’t playing football or volleyball, he was planting vegetables and feeding the livestock.

During the summer holidays, a girl called Svetlana used to visit her grandparents in the village. She and Oleksandr fell in love and in 2014, while anti-government protests raged in Kyiv, they got married. But Russia’s invasion last year forced the couple apart: Svetlana and their two children are waiting out the war in a town eight hours’ drive away.

Ukraine’s emergency workers are revered as valiant saviours, but surely Oleksandr gets nervous? ‘You can be hit at any moment,’ he says. ‘Of course we’re scared. If you’re not scared, you’re stupid. But when you get in the ambulance and start driving, adrenalin steps in.’ Solidarity also softens the fear. ‘We entrust our lives to each other,’ he adds.

Breakfast doesn’t last long. A Russian shell has struck the town centre, causing possible casualties. Igor, Oleksandr and Sasha sprint to their ambulance and race to the scene.

A hatchback is parked near a small crater, its windscreen shattered. Inside, a middle-aged man is slumped in the front, shards of glass scattered around his pack of cigarettes on the passenger’s seat. A hole the size of a 50-pence coin is torn into his neck. There’s nothing that Oleksandr’s men can do – the shrapnel probably killed him instantly.

An elderly lady walks up to the car, tears running down her face. ‘When will it end?’ she sobs. ‘How much more can people take?’ Others seem less shocked. Passers-by with shopping bags barely glance at the wrecked car. A couple of cyclists ride past, a few feet from the corpse – another death that doesn’t even make the news. The killing feels unnervingly routine, almost mundane.

But the mood quickly changes. A man in his 60s walks over and starts berating the police, bizarrely claiming that a Ukrainian shell caused the explosion. It doesn’t make sense – Russian positions are in the opposite direction – but he’s adamant. Nor is it the first time the cops have heard this. In a region of divided loyalties, many pro-Russian locals have stayed on to await Moscow’s ‘liberation’ and while they generally keep a low profile, accusations like this are a telltale sign.

‘Your documents, please,’ says a policeman, before asking for his phone too. Informants working for Russia’s intelligence agencies in Ukrainian-held areas help to direct artillery strikes by text message.

The interrogation unfolds in front of me and the firemen — themselves diehard Ukrainian patriots working in a place where Soviet nostalgia lingers alongside ambivalence, if not total aversion, towards Ukraine’s statehood. Here, dangers posed by an external nemesis are matched by fears of an enemy within. This man’s precise allegiance, however, isn’t clear.

‘Go and hang Putin by his balls,’ he says. ‘And then Zelensky, and those who started this here.’

‘It wasn’t us who attacked,’ says the cop. ‘We’re defending our homeland.’

‘You were warned,’ the man replies cryptically.

The policeman lets him go, though not before taking a photo of him for Kyiv’s security services. Later I ask Igor how he reconciles his own loyalty to Ukraine with helping compatriots who support the enemy.

‘They’re our people – Ukrainians,’ he shrugs. ‘We need to help them. What difference does it make what’s in their minds?’

***

Before the next emergency call comes in, Igor takes the opportunity to boost his paramedic skills. Ukraine’s health service has been stretched thin by the war and during each evacuation it’s down to him to keep the wounded alive until they reach hospital.

Igor has a wide, friendly face and an easy manner. He has become a dab hand at fastening tourniquets and stuffing wounds to staunch bleeding, so today a local nurse, Tatiana Smirnova, is teaching him how to work an intravenous drip. And she’s offered up her arm for the lesson.

‘Push harder, come on!’ teases Tatiana as Igor leans over.

‘I’m pushing all the way!’

Next, she wants Igor to practise on a colleague – and Tatiana’s fireman husband is on duty today. ‘Find Maksym and we’ll put it in him,’ she grins.

It isn’t long till Igor’s medical skills are needed in the field. A frail lady in her 70s living with her severely ill husband in a front-line neighbourhood has called the emergency services. It’s late afternoon and Igor and Sasha drive there through empty streets – Toretsk becomes a ghost town well before night falls, along with the bombs. Once there, they knock on the gate of her dilapidated cottage as shellfire thunders nearby.

‘My husband – he had two strokes before the war, and this must be his third. He’s paralysed,’ she tells them.

Igor knows his limitations. ‘Let’s take him to the hospital,’ he replies. ‘He needs inpatient care.’.

Inside, pale and emaciated, her husband lies beneath blankets, a small cat nestled by his leg. The firemen check him over and head back outside with his wife. She seems scared that if he goes to hospital, he might then be evacuated further west and she won’t see him ever again. So she refuses to let him be taken, imploring Igor to give him medication on the spot. But he has neither the drugs nor the training.

The stand-off lasts for half an hour and the night is drawing in, as are the artillery exchanges.

‘It’s getting worse and worse every day,’ the old woman tells me. ‘I don’t know how to go on. My nerves are shaking. I can’t sleep at night. There isn’t a single house that hasn’t been hit somewhere. We survive, we don’t live.’

And yet, for her, leaving their home is out of the question. So eventually, after much negotiation, the firemen are forced to leave without their patient.

Igor shakes his head and gets back in the ambulance.

‘Such a fucked-up week,’ he mutters.

***

The bombardments are incessant but Igor is not only a fireman and a rescuer. He’s a husband and a father too. Back at base, he calls his wife Yulia over FaceTime. After Russia invaded, she moved with their five-year-old son and Igor’s mother to Mukachevo in Ukraine’s far west. Today she’s been taking driving lessons and, despite being separated by almost 900 miles, the pair joke as if they’re in the same room.

‘The air raid siren went off,’ she laughs. ‘Just as I got in the car.’

‘They turned it on, on purpose,’ teases Igor.

He gazes at the bedroom wall, picturing the scene. He hasn’t seen his family in months.

The couple have known each other since childhood, later becoming high-school sweethearts. But life at home wasn’t easy. His father, a miner, abandoned his mother when Igor was a young child. Igor was just 12 when he heard that he had died from tuberculosis. ‘He didn’t reach out,’ adds Igor. ‘But I don’t judge him.’

With a young son of his own, though torn apart by war, Igor is determined to be the father that his never was. ‘I’m learning how to be a dad,’ he says. ‘I’m trying to do everything possible to make my son happy.’

For now, however, the firemen of Toretsk offer a surrogate family. Facing death and overwhelming odds, their camaraderie, resolve and shared will to resist have bound this brotherhood with the same esprit de corps of any army platoon fighting in trenches nearby. Yet the war is relentless, ensnaring their lives in a daily, perpetual loop of dread, trauma, fatigue and adrenalin. After just two weeks embedded with them, I’m exhausted and strung-out by their nightmarish Groundhog Day. How on earth can they hold on for much longer?

The answer for Igor is two-fold – one that simply taps into the mindless repetition of war, while also embracing a profound and unbreakable ideal.

‘The current situation doesn’t allow me to think much,’ he explains. ‘You work every day, you get distracted.’ I push him on the matter and he responds: ‘We will have enough energy, no matter how long it lasts, because we have our goal and we know what we are fighting for: our independence, our future, our freedom, our children.’

No one knows how this devastating conflict will ultimately unfold. Donations of Western arms have bolstered Kyiv’s war effort, but that innate and unshakeable sense of mission to which Igor speaks is a weapon that money can’t buy. Without that strong foundation, arms deliveries alone would be no match for the Russian war machine. And, in the long run, such staunch fortitude is likely to tilt Ukraine towards some form of victory, albeit on a path strewn with slaughter and sacrifice.

Till then, the daily routine continues. One morning, I’m out with Igor and Oleksandr as they yank out a rocket casing from the mud as another 40-strong volley is launched nearby. That afternoon, under fire, they speed into a front-line community to save a woman wounded by a Russian shell that killed her husband in the same blast. Elsewhere, they tackle house fires in the dead of night, set ablaze not only by incoming artillery but also dodgy, makeshift heaters after Russia devastated Ukraine’s power network. Sometimes, they’re called out by residents who haven’t seen their neighbours for days; once inside, the firemen find elderly people at death’s door, or already dead – a grim, hidden consequence of the humanitarian crisis where a lack of heating, income and family support are causing a spike in these lonely ends.

Towards the last day of my stay, Igor and Sasha receive an order to collect four elderly people who can no longer look after themselves and bring them to the town centre. From there, they’ll be taken by minibus to a care home away from the warfront.

Among them is a blind widow in her 80s called Yulia. Inside her cramped, run-down home, pictures of saints and the Virgin Mary peel from the wall. A neighbour wraps her up in a winter coat and woollen hat before she crosses herself and hobbles out of her front door, probably for the last time.

For the firemen, this low-octane task is a welcome break from the intense stress of other operations. But it is intensely sad to witness – the old and the vulnerable forced into exile as Russia continues its nationwide blitz.

Once on the bus, some of her fellow passengers seem disconnected from this terrible reality. ‘Is there a war on, a real war?’ asks a smiling old gent behind her. ‘Or is it just a play?’

But blind Yulia sees it clearly. Before they depart, I ask her if she’s glad to be going somewhere safer. She doesn’t smile, and replies: ‘Probably nowhere is safe now.’
ENDS