WARNING: This story contains details that can be disturbing As usual before each flight, the veteran pilot of the Ukrainian army ran a hand along the fuselage of the Mi-8 helicopter, caressing the metal skin of the heavy carrier to bring luck to him and his crew. They would need it. Their destination – a besieged steel mill in the brutal city of Mariupol – was a death trap. Some other crews were unable to return alive. However, the mission was vital, even desperate. The Ukrainian troops are stuck, their supplies are dwindling, their dead and wounded are being stacked. Their last stop at the Azovstal mill was a growing symbol of Ukraine’s disobedience to the war against Russia. They could not be allowed to perish. The 51-year-old pilot – identified only by his first name, Oleksandr – flew only one mission to Mariupol and considered it the most difficult flight of his 30-year career. He took the risk, he said, because he did not want Azovstal fighters to feel forgotten. In the charred landscape of hell of this plant, in an underground medical station that was turned into a shelter that provided shelter from death and destruction from above, the news began to reach the wounded that a miracle might be coming. Among those told he was on the evacuation list was a junior sergeant who had been dismembered by mortars, slaughtering his left leg and forcing his amputation above the knee. “Buffalo” was his name. It had been so long, but another deadly challenge arose: the escape from Azovstal.

A series of clandestine high-speed helicopter missions hugging the ground to reach Azovstal defenders in March, April and May are being celebrated in Ukraine as one of the most heroic achievements of the four-month war. Some ended up in disaster. each became progressively more dangerous as Russian air defense batteries caught on. The full story of the seven rescue and relief missions has not yet been told. But from exclusive interviews with two injured survivors. a military intelligence officer who flew in the first mission; and interviews with pilots provided by the Ukrainian army, the Associated Press gathered the narrative of one of the last flights, from the perspective of both rescuers and rescuers. Only after more than 2,500 defenders who remained in the Azovstal ruins began to surrender did Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy first inform them of their missions and deadly costs. The insistence of Azovstal fighters had thwarted Moscow’s goal of quickly occupying Mariupol and prevented Russian troops there from being redeployed elsewhere. Zelensky told the Ukrainian television network ICTV that the pilots bravely endured the “strong” Russian air defenses crossing the enemy lines, flying with food, water, medicine and weapons, so that the defenders of the factory could fight and to throw out the wounded. The military intelligence officer said one helicopter was shot down and two others never returned and are missing. He said he was dressed in civilian clothes for his flight, thinking he could melt into the population if he survived a crash: “We knew it could be a one-way ticket.” Zelensky said: “These are absolutely heroic people who knew what was difficult, who knew it was almost impossible. “We lost a lot of pilots.”

If Buffalo had his way, he would not live to be evacuated. His life would have ended quickly, to save him from the agony he suffered after shots of 120 mm mortar that tore his left leg, bloodied his right leg and pepper his back with shrapnel during the battle of the trees in Mariupol on March 23. The 20-year-old spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity, saying he did not want to appear to be seeking publicity when thousands of Azovstal defenders were captured or killed. He was on the trail of a Russian tank, aiming to destroy it with the NLAW missile fired from the shoulder, piercing the shoulder, on the last day of the first month of the invasion, when his war was soon cut short. He was thrown next to the wreckage of a burning car, dragged to cover himself in a nearby building and “decided it would be better to crawl into the basement and die quietly there,” he said. But his friends evacuated him to the Ilyich steel plant, which then fell in mid-April as Russian forces tightened their grip on Mariupol and its strategic port on the Sea of ​​Azov. Three days passed before doctors managed to mutilate him in an underground bomb shelter. He considers himself lucky: The doctors were still anesthetizing when it was his turn to go under the knife. When he arrived, a nurse told him how sorry he was that he had lost his limb. He cut the embarrassment with a joke: “Will the money be returned for 10 tattoo sessions?” “I had a lot of tattoos on my leg,” he said. One remains, a human figure, but his legs are gone now. After the operation, he was transferred to the Azovstal factory. A fort covering almost 11 square kilometers, with a maze of 24 kilometers of underground tunnels and warehouses, the factory was practically impregnable. But conditions were bleak. “There were constant bombings,” said Vladislav Zahorodnii, a 22-year-old deacon who was shot in the pelvis, breaking a nerve, during a street fight in Mariupol. Evacuated to Azovstal, he met Buffalo there. They already knew each other: They were both from Chernihiv, a city in the north that was surrounded and pounded by Russian forces. Zahorodnii saw the missing leg. He asked Buffalo how he was doing. “Everything is fine, we will go to the club soon,” replied Buffalo.

Zahorodnii was evacuated from Azovstal by helicopter on March 31, after three failed attempts. It was his first helicopter flight. The Mi-8 caught fire as it exited, killing one of its engines. The other kept them in the air for the rest of the 80-minute journey early in the morning in the city of Dnipro on the Dnieper River in central Ukraine. He would mark his release with a tattoo on his right forearm: “I did it so I would not forget it,” he said. Buffalo’s turn came next week. He was ambiguous about leaving. On the one hand, he was relieved that his share of less food and water would now go to others who were still able to fight. on the other hand, “there was a painful feeling. They stayed there and I left them.” However, he almost lost his flight. The soldiers dragged him to a garage outside his deep shelter and loaded him into a truck that ran into a designated landing area. The soldiers wrapped him in a jacket. The ammunition load of the helicopter was first unloaded. The injured then boarded the ship. But not Buffalo. Left in the back corner of the truck, it was somehow overlooked. He could not sound the alarm because the mortar blasts had injured his neck and he was still too hoarse to hear the screams of the helicopter rotors. “I thought to myself, ‘Well, not today then,’” he recalls. “And suddenly someone shouted, ‘You forgot the soldier in the truck!’ Because the cargo bay was full, Buffalo was placed crosswise by the others, who had been loaded side by side. A member of the crew took his hand and told him not to worry, they would go home. “All my life,” he told the crew member, “I dreamed of flying by helicopter. “It does not matter if we arrive – my dream has come true.”

In his cockpit, the wait seemed endless to Oleksandr, the minutes seemed like hours. “Very scary,” he said. “You see explosions all around and the next shell can reach your location.” In the fog of war and with the full picture of undercover missions still emerging, it is not possible to be absolutely sure that Buffalo and the pilot who spoke to reporters in a video interview recorded and reported by the military were on the same flight. But the details of their accounts fit. They both gave the same date: the night of April 4-5. Oleksandr recalled being shot by a ship as it passed over the waters of Mariupol. An explosion wave threw the helicopter “like a toy”, he said. But his escape maneuvers got them out of trouble. Buffalo also remembers an explosion. The displaced were later informed that the pilot had avoided a rocket. Oleksandr fired the helicopter at a speed of 220 kilometers per hour and flew at a height of up to 3 meters above the ground – unless it jumped over electrical cables. A second helicopter never returned. on the return flight, the pilot told him wirelessly that he had no fuel. It was their last communication. In his garage, Buffalo had watched the ground pass through a porthole with a zipper. “We flew over the fields, under the trees. “Very low,” he said. They arrived in Dnipro safely. On landing, Oleksandr heard the injured man shouting at the pilots. He waited for them to shout that he threw them so violently during the flight. But when I opened the door, I heard the guys say, “Thank you,” he said. “Everyone applauded,” recalls Buffalo, who is currently undergoing detox with Zahorodny at a clinic in Kiev. “We told the pilots that they had done the impossible.”

AP journalists Sophiko Megrelidze in Tbilisi, Georgia and Oleksandr Stashevskyi in Kyiv contributed.

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