Last Stand at Azovstal: Inside the Siege That Shaped the Ukraine War, #Stand #Azovstal #Siege #Shaped #Ukraine #War Welcome to OLASMEDIA TV NEWSThis is what we have for you today:
Soldiers wrapped in blankets and sleeping bags, some of which were missing arms and legs, were hoisted into the helicopters, whose rotors never stopped spinning. They took off that day with eight or nine wounded fighters, Flint said, some of whom were conscious to show off cell phone videos of the intense fighting they had endured.
The March 21 mission, captured on video from Flint, lasted just 20 minutes on the ground. “There was just a sense of happiness, emotional satisfaction that we were able to get these guys out,” Flint said.
In total, Operation Air Corridor, as the participants were known to, managed to land helicopters on Azovstal seven times over the next two weeks and rescue 85 seriously injured soldiers, Flint said. Among the evacuees was a heavily sedated Sergeant Tsymbal.
Updated
July 24, 2022, 5:07 a.m. ET
But the helicopters also brought in other soldiers, mostly volunteers, including Pvt. Nikita Zherdev of the Azov regiment. His father had been killed in Mariupol’s shelling weeks earlier, and he wrote to his sister before he left, telling her she had to learn to take care of herself. He didn’t tell her what he thought: that he didn’t expect to leave alive.
“As soon as we landed in Azovstal, I understood that, wow, things really happen here,” he said. “Everything was under smoke. Everything was under fire. The people who greeted us shouted, ‘Faster, faster, faster – there are air strikes every five minutes, the jets are coming.’”
Private Zherdev, a resident of Mariupol, already knew the troops in Azovstal, but the men he found were withered ghosts of those soldiers, hungry and exhausted and covered in blood and gun oil after weeks of constant fighting. They were shocked to see him.