Inside Ukraine’s secret, helicopter rescue missions: ‘We lost a lot of pilots’
- A series of clandestine, helicopter missions to reach besieged soldiers are being celebrated in Ukraine as one of the riskiest in the war
- The flights delivered supplies and evacuated wounded during Ukraine’s last-ditch defence of the Azovstal steel mill in Mariupol
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 brutalised 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 hell-scape 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.