You're reading: Ukraine’s heroes: 40-year-old map helps ‘Cyborg’ save comrades

Editor’s Note: Ukraine's Heroes is a Kyiv Post project devoted to Ukrainian army heroes injured in Russia's war against the nation. Periodically we will tell the stories of these wounded warriors, many of whom need money for treatment, surgeries and prosthesis. At least 6,500 people have been killed, including at least 2,180 soldiers.

Volodymyr
Nebir, 23, still remembers the smell of smoke and taste in his mouth of the
gunpowder, metal, diesel fuel and burnt plastic.

“We
laughed with the guys that we really are the cyborgs,” Nebir says smiling,
referring to the moniker that Russian-separatists gave the Ukrainian troops who
guarded the Donetsk Airport.

For months soldiers defended the airport, facing
never-ending attacks by Russian-separatist forces, before Ukrainian forces
surrendered the ruined airport in January.

Nebir quit studies at the Military Institute of
Taras Shevchenko University in Kyiv to join the EuroMaidan activists last year.
In the summer of 2014, he joined the army as a machine-gunner.

“It was like darkness in front of me, I didn’t
know what it was, but I just felt I had to be there, that I am on the right
path. From time to time great fear appeared from that darkness, but I think it
was more like survival instinct. I am not sure I would be still alive without
that fear,” Nebir says.

He arrived at the Donetsk Airport on Dec 1, 2014,
and spent 12 severely cold days there.

“The
wind was blowing through holes in every wall, inside the same as outside,”
Nebir says. Food and water turned into ice. “I hadn’t taken my clothes off,
even my (armored) vest and helmet for 12 days.”

Nebir
was sent again to the airport, or what he says was its remains, in January as
part of a unit of six that occupied the airport’s control tower.

In
a couple of days, Russian-separatists would blow up the new terminal of the
airport.

“We
felt that ourselves: from the side, where the terminal was before, there was no
more resistance (from Ukrainian soldiers), and separatists fired at us from
their positions,” Nebir says. “The circle has been narrowing, we understood
that. Three vehicles, sent to take us out, were gunned down. We felt that there
would be no help. It was despair.”

Nebir
says his fellow soldiers started calling home to say their last goodbyes.

He
also texted one person, saying that he didn’t know whether he would get out
alive. The response he received told him to follow his intuition, which he did.

He
remembered that there was an old map somewhere in the building, printed in the
1970s. Cartography was his major at the university, so he managed to design a
more or less safe escape route. He used the old map that showed the landscape,
another map installed on his mobile phone with the new roads and buildings, and
intelligence data that he received.

One
problem remained – how to get out of the tower, as it was under constant fire. They waited for darkness and
requested shelling from the Ukrainian side, which made their enemies hide.
After an exact round of explosions, the “cyborgs” started to run. All got out
alive, though
Nebir received a concussion. He remembers a “painful
squeak, like needles were going through my brain.”

After
undergoing treatment in Kyiv, and numerous tests, Nebir returned to the war
zone.

He
says he is still afraid: “Only a fool would not be afraid.”

However,
there is no darkness anymore. He knows perfectly well what he is doing.

Kyiv Post staff writer Alyona
Zhuk can be reached at
[email protected].