Slava, short for Vyacheslav had studied religion and philosophy at a Kyiv University, and then San Francisco State University. He is a well-known scholar, who has written an academic book on the history of organised faiths and denominations, and their present-day decline. He also lived in an ashram in India where he learned yoga, and meditation. On a lighter side, he is also a founder and the High Priest of the Church of the Supreme Duck, an invented religious cult aiming to outperform the Flying Spaghetti Monster religion. The Ukrainian Duck is meant to overpower the imperial Russian double-headed eagle from below, while its heads simultaneously facing East and West.
The cult has become particularly relevant recently, when the Russian relentless propaganda machine has accused Ukrainians of developing biological weapons and using ducks as delivery vehicles. The Ukrainians have retaliated by saying that they have already developed a “Duck 2.0 model” with a sphincter, which allows it to hold its infected intestinal contents while flying over the Ukrainian territory. It only relieves itself of it once the Russian border is crossed.
When I asked Slava about his church and what exactly it is they do, his answers were quite laconic:
“We sit, observe ducks, and meditate!”. When I asked him about the number of his followers – “Dozens and going up”.
In 2014, during the most recent Maidan revolution, which was initially sparked by student protests against the then Kyiv Russian puppet regime’s opposition to joining the EU, and the subsequent violent clampdown of peaceful demonstrations, Slava was with the protesters throughout that cold winter in the epicentre of the events on the Maidan square. During a confrontation with the police (or Russian secret service – the lines were blurred at the time) a projectile, most likely a smoke bomb landed on Slava’s head, and knocked him unconscious. When he came round, he lost his ability to move his arms. He spent the following month in the hospital recovering from his head injury. Fortunately, he fully recovered and was discharged with an advice to take it easy.
By that time, the revolution succeeded, and the Russian puppet fled to Russia. However, the celebrations did not last long, as Putin annexed Crimea, and started war in the East shortly thereafter. Slava signed up as a volunteer medic with a territorial army infantry battalion. After a basic army and tactical medical training, he went to the Eastern frontline where he fought with his battalion until that war ended up in a stalemate.
He came back to his academic studies, and decided to get a degree in clinical psychology, which he nearly completed. And then the current war started on February, the 24th…
Slava signed up to go to the frontline with a territorial army infantry battalion a few days after the war had started. He had a combat, and tactical medical experience, so he was in a much better position than many others. At the beginning of the war, procurement of most of the kit, both military, and certainly tactical medical one relied on volunteers heavily. Everything was lacking. Bulletproof vests, helmets, camouflage, shoes – everything was hastily being bought in Europe, and brought into the country by an army of volunteers, consisting mostly of women, and older people as men of 18-60 years old were not allowed to leave the country due to the new universal mobilisation law. It was truly a great people’s war with everyone doing their bit for the great victory over the Empire of Nothing.
Unfortunately, there was also a lot of low-quality unreliable cheap stuff flooding the country. A few vultures were making money on war as has often been the case throughout human history.
Slava managed to obtain a military kit, and camo of reasonable quality, which cannot be said of his medical one. Initially, they only had access to Soviet Army-type kits, which contained some iodine-based antiseptic, Paracetamol tablets, nasal spray, and some other obscure useless stuff. Being the only medic of the battalion, Slava worked hard to make sure that their kit is up to the universal standard. Gradually, he managed to obtain good-quality tourniquets, and haemostatic bandages.
Medical Kit in the early days of the war.
They were stationed near Kyiv, and their task was to hold the recently liberated borders of the region. While digging trenches, they discovered an old network dug by Russian soldiers during World War 2 to protect the city against the German Army 80 years earlier. Another reminder of that war came in the form of MG42s, the notorious Nazi machine guns, which were apparently continued to be produced under licence in some countries after the war had finished. Slava’s battalion had received a few brand new MG42s dated 1951 as a military aid from an Eastern European country. So, they used the old Soviet fortifications to fight Russians with Nazi machine guns…
The tools of the trade – an AK, and an MG41 Nazi machine gun in the Soviet Army trenches built in 1941.
It was cold at nights, and it was scary, especially when you heard a high-pitched whistling sound of increasing intensity, which meant that a mortar shell was about to land somewhere close. Slava does not remember having philosophical conversations with himself, experiencing complex feelings, or having some deep insights while that was happening. As an experienced soldier he was doing what he had been trained to do to protect himself, and others around him. No feelings, just mechanical actions aimed at staying alive over and over again. At times, he would get angry, wishing he was back home in his warm home in Kyiv writing another book on the history of religion, and that was the only feeling that he remembers.
A soldier’s home away from home.
One night the shelling was particularly intense. Also, the mortars were not making a familiar whistling sound, but a lower pitched buzzing one. Explosions were getting closer and were of a higher intensity than usual. There was a deafening sound of explosion, then Slava felt something hit his lower back. He was lying face down at the bottom of a shallow trench that he had not quite finished digging. He quickly dug himself out of the dirt and sand which he was covered with, and quickly examined himself – there was no blood anywhere. He felt no pain, just an adrenaline rush of someone who got out of it unscathed, yet again. Tinnitus, and a slight nausea did not count – he learned to live with it by then.
A fragment from the mine that they were shelled with on that night.
There was a little break in shelling, so Slava made a quick round of the trenches nearby. There was a “300”, which means “wounded” in Ukrainian military jargon (“200” means “dead”). One of the soldiers had jumped into the trench, covering one of the officers who had already been lying there. A shell fragment ended up in his back and stopped just underneath the skin of his abdomen. You could see it bulging there. There was a large entry wound, but no external bleeding, which was characteristic of that type of injury – hot fragments tended to coagulate capillaries a bit like surgical diathermy. The soldier was conscious, and in pain. The officer was completely unscathed – the soldier took it for him this time…
As the only medic of the battalion, Slava had to take a leadership role in organising evacuation of the wounded soldier. It happened in the early days of war, basic things were lacking, there was chaos, and the fog of war. He chose three other soldiers for his mission. There was not even a stretcher, so they had to use a sleeping bag to carry the wounded man. Their route lay through a mine field, which they had themselves previously mined, so they knew their way through it. You just needed to follow a narrow path demarcated by threads, which were then supposed to be pulled out if they had to withdraw from their positions. But it was a particularly dark night with almost zero visibility, so it was not a walk in the park by any stretch of imagination. Before they had left, Slava packed the soldier’s wound with a haemostatic gauze, and gave him a weak opioid (a partial agonist for the connoisseurs among you) by intramuscular injection. It was the best he could do.
– Was he conscious throughout the journey? (L.K.)
– Yes, although sometimes he was becoming a bit sleepy. I had to talk to him constantly.
– What did you talk to him about? (L.K.)
– Nothing in particular, just simple things like “Stay with me”, “Don’t you dare fall asleep”, “You will be fine”.
They carried him for about a mile and were completely out of breath by the time they reached a military ambulance, which they had called for on their radio earlier. Slava says that unfortunately, this reflects a generally poor physical fitness levels of the Ukrainian Army, and the society in general. The NATO guidelines recommend using two people for the same job, but do not allow for use of a sleeping bag instead of stretcher, and a mile of minefields as an evacuation route.
When they finally reached the field hospital, they all breathed a sigh of relief. It had been a long cold night, and everyone was happy to have made it to safety, especially the wounded soldier, who was taken to theatre straight away. Once Slava finally sat down, he felt a discomfort in his right buttock and asked a nurse to have a look.
“You have an entry wound in your buttock! We have to do an Xray ASAP.” Slava remembered having been hit into his lower back when he was lying in the trench, “That is what it was!”
He was taken to the XRay, and sure enough there was a fragment stuck in his pelvis. As was the case with the wounded soldier they had carried, there was no external bleeding as the hot fragment pierced through the tissues and coagulated small blood vessels on its way. Amazingly, it also spared all the major vessels, and vital structures inside his pelvis – luckily for him, the fragment took an oblique trajectory, and ended up inside the muscles, rather than inside the pelvic cavity, or his spine. It was all discovered later while he was on the operating table for an exploration of his wound.
The fragment removed from Slava’s buttock.
Small fragment, large incision.
At the same time, the soldier was being operated in a theatre next door. He was also very lucky – a big fragment passed just below his kidney sparing all the major blood vessels. It did cause some damage to his intestines and ended up in his abdominal muscles. Thus, he needed some limited resection of his intestine without the need for a stoma.
Both men have fully recovered and are back with their unit.
Talking with Slava about his experience I was struck by how little emotional dimension he attaches to it.
“I was just doing what I had been trained to do”,
“I had to take a lead on this”,
“I just talked to the guy constantly, telling him not to fall asleep”.
“I carried the guy in a sleeping bag through mine fields for a couple of hours while there was a shell fragment stuck deep inside my arse”
– that one would be good headline for the Daily Mail.
There is no emotionalising, no excessive reflections when he talks about his war experiences. He will become a philosopher, and now a clinical psychologist once he is back from war, and something tells me that he will be an exceptional one. For now, there is a job to be done.
Also, he says he will now pay more attention to his physical fitness. He has seen the importance of being physically strong, and the consequences of being weak, and those consequences include the loss of life itself when it matters most.
He still wants to finish his second book on the history of religion, although it might now have a slightly new dimension to it. As they say, there are no atheists in foxholes…