Glib
Glib took his oath of enlistment into Ukrainian Marine Corps on February 24th, 2021 – exactly one year before the start of the Russian invasion. For him, it had been a logical choice – both his brother, and father-in-law had been in the Army, and had been taking part in the war against Russia since 2014; he himself had been volunteering during that war. He had studied history of Ukraine as part of his bachelor’s degree in History at the University. Ukraine was everything for him – when she had found herself in trouble, he felt it was his duty to defend it.
He had always wanted to join the Marine Corps as they were seen as the Army’s most elite force. Not only that, but he had also made it his goal to become a part of their 1st Battalion – the elite within the elite. It was the original Marine Corps Battalion, which had been set up after Ukraine had become an independent state in 1993. The Battalion had become famous as one of the few units which had refused to give up their allegiance to the Ukrainian Army and join the ranks of Russian invaders during the annexation of Crimea in 2014. “Loyalty forever” was the Marine Corps’ motto, and Glib was inspired by it.
During military exercises
To join the Marines was no easy task. Not only one had to pass a physical and intellectual ability test, but also be assessed psychologically, and recommended by a Marine Corps officer. To be selected was not a mean fit – it was a closed club, with very restrictive membership criteria. To Glib, it was an honour to be selected. On the day of the Oath, marines were presented with aquamarine berets, their distinctive headgear signifying the colour of the sea. Glib was presented his beret by a decorated Marine colonel, a hero of Ukraine, and a personal hero of his, who had been in Crimea during the Russian invasion, and fought them with honour instead of giving up like many others.
Glib is presented with an aquamarine beret by the decorated Hero of Ukraine
By the end of 2021, Glib and his unit were stationed in a village not far from Mariupol in the southern Ukraine. Their positions were only about 700 metres from the border of the “Donetsk Peoples’ Republic”, a Russian puppet state, which had been created as a result of the Russian invasion in 2014. That conflict had never really died out. There had been constant mortar shellings, machine gun rounds, drone attacks, and other provocations that had been keeping the marines busy.
The war
On the evening of February 23rd Glib’s unit was ordered to maintain full combat readiness. They were also told to switch off their phones. At 4:30 a.m. they were ordered to prepare for an assault. Shortly afterwards, Russian artillery started shelling their positions, while their multiple rocket launchers were lighting up the sky above Mariupol behind them. Glib remembers sitting in a cold muddy trench, getting deafened by explosions, and getting used to his new reality. The shelling carried on well into the day. Then they were allowed to switch on their phones, and the news about the all-out war started flooding in. That is how Glib learned about the war – scrolling his phone in a cold muddy trench being shelled by Russian artillery.
During those first few days they kept changing their positions, slowly retreating towards Mariupol until they ended up on the grounds of one of the city’s two massive steel works named “Ilych” originally after Vladimir Ilych Lenin, and then, when Ukraine started erasing its Communist past re-named after another Ilych – a well-known Ukrainian engineer, who had worked there during the Soviet times. People jokingly called it the steel works named after “not that Ilyich”. It was massive, having previously housed about 30,000 workers. It had been closed for some time previously, but offered a reasonable shelter for the Mariupol’s defenders, especially as far as its elaborate network of underground tunnels was concerned.
Russians surrounded Mariupol at the beginning of March, cutting all the supply lines for both the city’s defenders, and its inhabitants, who had not been able to escape. Those civilians ended up hiding in basements, and bomb shelters, as well as within the underground tunnels of the two large steel works. The city was being heavily bombed from both sea and air. At one point all the overground structures of the Ilyich steelworks were almost totally levelled.
Glib remembers living on Adrenaline during that time. They quickly ran out of food, and basic supplies, and resorted to drinking some technical water. He rarely felt hungry, or thirsty, or in fact sleepy. He often went on 2-3 hours of sleep per day. He remembers their interactions with civilians. There were children there living underground with them. They needed to see the sunlight at least occasionally, and the soldiers would take them out when it was relatively “quiet”. They always stayed with children, guarding them, and risking their own lives so that the kids could go outside for a breath of fresh air. There were constant bombings, and then street fights as Russians were tightening their noose around the steel works, until they were completely encircled, and were only coming out for short missions, mainly at night.
The injury
On April 10th, one month and a half after the start of the war, Glib came out of his shelter for a short reconnaissance mission. He climbed the stairs of a half-destroyed building, stopping on the third floor as there appeared to be a good panoramic view of the factory’s grounds from there. He carefully stepped out onto the floor and looked outside through the big gaping hole where the wall had used to be. Below, not far from where he was standing was a Russian tank with its cannon aimed directly at him.
“The thing with tanks is that if you see it pointing at you – there is no time to jump, the shell is going to hit you at this very second. There is not a millisecond gap between the moment they fix you as a target, and the moment you get hit. With a stationary cannon, or an RPG you have a few milliseconds, but with a tank you are a toast!”
So, this is exactly what happened – next thing Glib knew was that he was falling down from the third floor along with the concrete rubble, having had his tympanic membranes ruptured, and eyes burned by the explosion a few moments earlier. Miraculously, he survived that fall. A good quality body armour and helmet helped, so his torso (apart from a few broken ribs) and his head were relatively spared. His pelvis, however was crushed into pieces, his lower jaw broken; he was deafened, and partially blind. His main problem at that moment, was the fact that he was buried underneath the rubble. He was alive, but he needed his comrades to find him. He had a UHF radio strapped to his shoulder, but his arms were fixed within the concrete rubble. So, he started shouting in Ukrainian, mostly of pain. Shortly afterwards, he heard Ukrainian voices answering back to him. They pulled him out of the rubble and carried him to safety.
They had a very basic medical facility underground, where a pelvic binder was applied. That basic device fixed his broken pelvis temporarily, so the fragments did not move which was causing excruciating pain. They assessed his other injuries but were not able to do any meaningful interventions to treat them. Pelvic binder and some basic painkillers were everything he could hope for while still at the steel works. In a couple of days, it was decided that the best chance for him to survive, to get medical help would have been to surrender as a POW along with several other seriously wounded Ukrainian soldiers.
The Russian Hell
Two days after he was wounded, Glib along with several others was handed over to the Russians at the gates of the factory. They were taken to a hospital in Novoazovsk, a town within the occupied territory. The trip along a bumpy road while lying on the floor of the bus with his broken pelvis was horrible, but at least the binder was still on… Because the first thing Russians did when they reached the hospital was to remove the binder. “Suffer, dillhead!” – they told him, which is a derogatory term Russians use to address Ukrainians. Glib nearly cried of an excruciating pain caused by pelvic fragments rubbing against each other.
There was a Russian doctor admitting them who refused to talk to him unless he spoke Russian back to him. When Glib finally did, the doctor simply turned around and left with a smirk. The seriously wounded, like Glib were thrown on uncomfortable hospital beds, and were pretty much abandoned. Glib did not receive any medical help while there. A soldier next to him, who had suffered severe injuries to his limbs, and had shell fragments stuck in his arms, had only basic bandages applied around his wounds. They were given some revolting looking food, but Glib could not eat it anyway because of his broken jaw.
He was suffering intolerable levels of pain but did not receive any pain killers. He found some relief only when he was dozing off, when his brain was temporarily shutting itself off. Being a deeply religious man, he was praying, and that was giving him strength to carry on. Miraculously, he managed to keep his golden cross. Others were not so lucky – Russians took away all the jewellery they could get their hands on.
A few days later, Glib was transferred to a hospital in Donetsk, the capital of the DPR, a fake puppet state, which had been created by Russia in 2014. Most of the medical personnel there were ethnic Ukrainians, but they had been brainwashed by the Russian propaganda into believing that all Ukrainian soldiers were Nazis, so Glib was treated as badly as he had been in his previous hospital. No pain relief was ever given. Health care assistants would leave some food on a stand a few meters away from his bed, knowing full well that he would not be able to reach it, or eat it independently even if he had. They would then come back a couple of hours later and see it untouched. “So, you are not hungry then”, they would say, and take it away.
Doctors would occasionally do a quick ward round only to say, without looking at him – “Oh well, we do not have specialists you need around here”, before walking away. He had been catheterised previously as he had not been able pass urine himself. Nobody had ever flushed the catheter since then or taken any basic hygienic care of his body. Occasionally, he got “lucky”, and a Ukrainian nurse who felt sorry for him would wipe his body with some wet wipes. He also suffered from severe constipation – lying in bed with zero mobility, experiencing unbearable levels of pain, eating minimal amounts of bad food with no fibre, and drinking very little water did not help. At one point, the pain in his distended stomach got so bad, that he had forgotten about his broken pelvis. He thought he was going to burst, like some sort of grotesque faecal bomb. He also thought that for a marine it would have been a dishonourable way to go, and that thought kept him going for a while until some nurses finally felt sorry for him and gave him an enema on Day 13 of his imprisonment…
That enema was one of the two medical interventions that Glib was given during his 16-day stay in the hospitals on the occupied territory. The other one was his jaw fixation with temporary wires performed by a maxillofacial surgeon at the hospital in Donetsk. Let me say that again – two medical interventions in 16 days for a patient with a broken pelvis, lower jaw, ribs, as well as a head injury, and partial blindness. No pain relief was ever administered. Zero. In a hospital.
There were also psychological tortures employed to break their spirit. Ukrainian soldiers were not allowed to speak Ukrainian to each other when Russians were around. They had to watch Russian propaganda TV several times per day. The hospital staff who had had access to Russian TV channels for the previous 8 years kept blaming them for shelling Donetsk, and killing children, and spouting some other vile Russian propaganda at them. Once, nurses saw a Russian TV programme about some Nazi tattoos that the Ukrainian military allegedly force on all the new recruits. They then all came to the ward, and started examining their bodies looking for those Nazi tattoos…
The Ukrainians were constantly told that most of their country was now occupied, with all the major cities having fallen into the hands of “the glorious Russian Army”. They were completely cut off from the outside world, so could not tell if it was true, or not.
Russian TV crews were always around looking for opportunities to make some propagandist videos. Later, Glib discovered that he too had starred at a Russian TV programme. In the video, he is asked to identify himself, which he does saying his name, date of birth, and the unit he had been fighting with, as well as listing the injuries he had sustained.
Freedom
One night, they were told to get ready for a transfer into a prison. Those with broken limbs put some improvised splints on to keep them immobilized during transfer. Glib needed a pelvic binder, but there was none available. He remembers being carried to an ambulance by two Russians on an old rag. The pain was unbearable, and he passed out a few times on the way. He was then loaded into an ambulance, which was driven across the border into Russia. After several hours of driving, they arrived at a military airport, and were loaded into a transport plane. There were three other badly wounded Ukrainian soldiers lying on the stretchers. There were other Ukrainian POWs there, who were sitting down with their arms, legs, mouths and eyes duck taped. Glib talks about that episode with a raw emotion:
“It looked like a movie about terrorists, and those guys looked like hostages, and not POWs, which are supposed to be treated according to the principles outlined in the Geneva Convention of Human Rights. I could not make myself look at those guys, my blood was boiling. It was clear to me that Russians did not consider us as military personnel to whom any international laws should apply. To them we were simply hostages. It was quite a vivid proof that Russia is a terrorist state.”
Nobody knew where they were being taken to. After a few hours, the plane landed in Sebastopol in the occupied Crimea. It was becoming clear that they were being prepared for a POW swap. However, knowing Russians, he could not trust them until he found himself on the Ukrainian soil.
They were loaded on a military truck and taken across Crimea through its battered roads. He was lying on the floor and felt every pothole underneath. His brothers-in-arms were trying to support his shoulders and legs throughout their entire bumpy journey.
“I knew I was going home, dead or alive. I was trying to stay alive. I knew that if I had survived those few more hours, then I would have been given some medical help, and pain killers. Just a few more hours, and that intolerable pain would have been gone. I clenched my fists and prayed.”
When they finally approached the no-man’s-land, the territory separating the Russian and Ukrainian positions, the severely wounded soldiers were transferred into Ukrainian ambulances. Then a Ukrainian driver came in and said – “Welcome home, boys! It is all over; your suffering is over now!” Glib could not hold up his tears. He says that it was the second time when he thought he was going to die, but was told otherwise in Ukrainian. The first time it had happened when he had been trapped underneath the rubble, and finally heard Ukrainian language realising that it was his brothers-in-arms who had found him. The second time was then, during the swap when a Ukrainian driver told him that they were finally home. He realised that he could now speak his mother tongue without any fear, that he would have finally been treated like a human being. He realised that for him, Ukrainian was not just a communication tool, but also an important part of his identity.
Since that day, Glib has undergone a few surgeries, and done really well. He has had to learn how to walk, do a lot of everyday routines that we take for granted. His vision is not back to normal yet, but he is able to walk unassisted. He experiences bouts of anger and frustration when he does not want to talk to anybody, but most of the time he is a good-natured, considerate, polite, and positive guy with a good sense of humour.
At a Ukrainian hospital, finally receiving treatment for his broken pelvis
He has done a few interviews for various media outlets including the BBC about his ordeal, so the main events are public knowledge.
Glib reflects
I asked him about things that kept him going, things that made him survive the horrors of the war, living under Russian siege, and his imprisonment. Here’s a summary of the things that he told me.
When they were stationed in a village close to Mariupol, and later inside the steelworks before being encircled by Russians, they felt fully supported by their fellow Ukrainians, who were often bringing food, and cigarettes to the soldiers. They felt that they were doing an important job defending their people whose faces they were seeing. They were all united by a common purpose, and that gave the soldiers a great boost to continue their fight.
Later, under the siege, and living under constant bombardments, and often not being able to come out of their shelter for long periods of time, the soldiers spent their time discussing their dreams for their future, as well as what they were planning to do, what steps they were going to take to make their dreams a reality. They all believed in a better future. It was as if they had already hit the bottom, and the only way out was to go up. They all decided that whatever life was about to throw at them they would have tried and survived. No matter how bad it got, they never considered ending their own lives, not voluntarily, and choosing life over death every time. That was their baseline, their motto – Live no matter what!
Live no matter what! Learning to walk again
Also, when things were getting particularly desperate, Glib tried to shift his focus, to look at the situation from a different angle, to consider as many points of view as possible, rather than getting stuck inside his own perspective. There was always something positive, a glimpse of hope even in what seemed like a complete darkness. There was also their brotherhood where no one wanted to let their brothers down.
After Glib was wounded and ended up in a hospital in the occupied territory, he had to tap into his inner reserves, dig deep into the most remote corners of his soul to survive the unbearable pain, loneliness, and despair. What gave him strength to carry on? Firstly, his faith. Glib had always been a religious man, having embraced Christianity long before joining the Army. In fact, he saw himself as a kind of warrior monk, having ended a relationship prior to joining the Army, so there would not have been any emotional attachments that would affect his decision-making abilities while under pressure. He was saying prayers and psalms constantly while in the Russian hospital, and they helped him survive, take his mind off his suffering. He kept telling himself that there was a God’s plan that he was not supposed to understand, that he was still alive because he was meant for something he did not need to know. He kept telling himself that the extent of one’s suffering always matches their ability to tolerate it, and that thought kept him going.
With his spiritual mentor at his church before the war
Secondly, it was his membership of an elite military unit that helped him survive with his honour intact. The Marine Corps selection process was very tough, and those coming out of the other end of it had a few things in common – they were tough as nails, and they shared the same values, which they were all prepared to die for. It was a tight knit brotherhood, where loyalty was above all else. When Glib received his aquamarine beret from the decorated Marine Colonel, a Hero of Ukraine, his personal hero, he was on top of the World. It was one of the most important moments of his life. The Colonel then told him “Be a worthy Marine!”, and it had stuck. When he was feeling low and wanted to give up because of constant unbearable levels of pain, he remembered those words, and tried to live up to them. They were not just words; they became his call for action.
Also, he would have often recited the Oath that he had given during the ceremony, which he remembered by heart. “I hereby swear on my honour to defend the sovereignty of Ukraine and its people, or die…” The Oath helped him survive through the darkest moments, it was like an exorcism against his inner demons telling him to give up.
According to him, it was those two faiths – in God, and in Brotherhood that helped him pull through the unimaginable horrors of those 16 days in Hell.
There is another issue, which he has asked me to write about, and that is the Ukrainian civic society, which is being born amid this horrible war. Putin has given Ukrainians a common purpose, which is to survive as a nation. Never before had the military been treated so well; the war effort has become everybody’s business. Glib and his comrades certainly felt the love of ordinary Ukrainians when they were given food and shelter by the villagers before retreating towards Mariupol. It worked both ways – when they got stuck inside the steel works with civilians, they treated them like their own, taking children outside for some sunshine when it was relatively safe, making sure that the vulnerable be the first to get fed and watered, giving their supplies to them first.
There were different examples, however. In some villages they were told to move on as their presence made people a target for Russian artillery. Glib could not blame them – he saw a man’s house blown up to pieces as he was watching from across the street. He could only imagine how that must have felt. Glib himself had no home, or family of his own to worry about, and he understood that he was not the one to judge those people who did have things to lose.
Those civilians who lived with them in the tunnels, and whom they were treating, giving up their own food rations, and protecting as their own, finally gave up, flew a white flag, and surrendered to Russians. Again, Glib understood them too, and tried not to judge. Initially, he was upset about the fact that not everyone had the same high levels of morale as the Marines, but he knew it was going to take time, and was more concerned with setting the right example, rather than judging others.
He could only imagine how it must have felt to have to make the choice between the safety of your own family, your home and the common good, the future of your land. To him, it was good enough to think that those difficult questions, those choices were being contemplated by his fellow citizens, something that he could not have imagined only a few months before. He thought that he was witnessing the birth of a civic society, and it was important for him to know that as a soldier fighting for his people. He knew that as a nation Ukrainians had grown immensely since the start of the war.
Glib is getting better physically, but it will take time for his soul to be healed. He wants to go back and fight Russians again, once he fully recovers, but is mentally prepared for a possibility of not being able to continue that fight. He says that he will be doing what is necessary, and what is within his means, and beyond to make sure his beloved Ukraine wins the war and prosper as a society of citizens of high moral code. He himself has certainly set the bar very high.
He has recovered to the point of being able to run on thread mill – an amazing achievement, considering the nature, and extent of his injuries, as well as the delay at treating them!
My notes.
This was one of the most difficult stories for me to write, particularly the part about the tortures, and a complete medical neglect by my “colleagues”. For what I know, some of them might have gone to the same medical school as me…
What has happened to them? How did they end up in a place where not only ignoring the pleas by a desperately ill patient, but actively causing more pain had been normalised? I understand the influence of propaganda, and the fact that they might be living in a totally different world than me. By now, I have a pretty good idea of how this is done, and I do accept that. But, how do you make the next step from just being a cog in a wheel, who believes in a narrative about Ukrainian Nazis bombing their own children to actively hurting a helpless severely injured Ukrainian POW, who has basic human rights, including a right to have his pain treated? How could you just ignore his pleas for 16 days? How could you remove his makeshift pelvic binder, and tell him to suffer?
We ask those questions because they are such a drastic deviation from our reality, our values. For Russians, it has been a slow process, a process of degradation of their civic society, only accelerated by the Putin’s 22 years in power. Any degradation takes time. Any degradation is a default position of human beings. As an individual, you have to put up an active resistance to fight it, if it is normalised on a societal level. You look around, and you think it is OK to be like everyone else? Well, do not be surprised if you get the same results, and end up in the same place as everyone else.
There are multiple temptations to do things that slowly breach your belief system, your moral code. You keep making small compromises, that chip away on your integrity, until there is none left. Sometimes, you might even agree to do things in the name of “the higher good”, or think that any action should cause a reaction of the same magnitude.
I remember starting my career as an anaesthesiologist in Moscow, in the late 1990s. I worked in one of the largest acute care hospitals, and we were very busy. There was violence in the streets, there were lots of “combat” trauma coming in, less blast injuries, but enough gunshot, and knife wounds for sure. Sometimes, we had to treat extremely violent criminals, and their vulnerable victims in quick succession. Some of those victims were small children. I had just had my first daughter and felt particularly emotional about those poor little souls. I also felt very very angry about the necessity to treat the scum that had hurt them. I remember wanting to hurt them myself, and I did have a capacity to do so. Just trust me, I did. But, I also remember thinking that it would have been a red line that should never be crossed. As a doctor, it has never been, never is, and will never be my place to judge anyone under my care. My only job is to treat the body, nothing else. This is how a civic democratic society should function. Everyone does the job that they are qualified to do – doctors treat, judges judge.
However, that would have been a too drastic choice for me to make – a too big a chip would have fallen off from my integrity, that I would not have been able to simply ignore, or recover from it. I could see that most of my colleagues were having similar internal dialogues and making similar choices at the time. However, 20 years have passed, and doctors (not all, but clearly a few) in Russia are now making different choices. Let this be a warning for us all.
Also, I hope that reading through Glib’s story you would be as inspired as I have been by his strength and integrity, as well as the resistance he managed to put up – the resistance that helped him not to allow a constant unimaginable pain and degradation of his physical body to affect his integrity and grace. Let it be an inspiration for us all.
My favorite photo of Glib – recently in Kyiv in front of a building with a huge banner dedicated to the defenders of Mariupol