Last winter, the 100th Separate Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian Army was fighting advancing Russian troops in the city of Toretsk north of Donetsk.
Three Ukrainian soldiers found themselves separated from the rest of their unit. With enemy forces closing in, they hunkered down and tried to wait out the battle.
They would remain trapped in Toretsk for seven weeks.
One soldier, Yuriy, began documenting his experiences of living under siege. He recorded a video diary showing the devastation to the city and his efforts to survive on minimal supplies.
He recorded messages for his family, telling them that he had lost count of the number of days he had spent in Toretsk. Sometimes the sounds of gunfire or shelling can be heard over his voice.
“There were three strikes,” Yuriy says in one video. “The problem is that we have nowhere to retreat.”
When they ventured out, the soldiers came across the bodies of Russian servicemen who had died in combat. They took the dead soldiers’ field radios and listened in on the transmissions.
In one message, he said, “Their officer was telling his group that there was sniper and machine-gun fire in that area, so there were many [dead Russian] soldiers they would have to crawl through.”
The besieged Ukrainians saw the growing death toll first hand. Through a window screen, Yuriy filmed what he described as a local dog eating the body of a fallen soldier.
Despite the ongoing fighting, the men were able to contact their comrades farther from the front lines and asked them to use drones to send supplies. The badly needed deliveries included food and new insoles for the boots Yuriy wore through the harsh winter.
By the time Russian forces had moved on from Toretsk and Ukrainian soldiers were able to rescue their three trapped comrades, they had spent 49 days under siege.
Yuriy said they had supported one another and tried to keep each other’s hopes alive. He described how one of the other soldiers had reassured him, saying, “Everything will be fine, guys. It’ll be OK. We’ll get out.”
In the end, they did -- with Yuriy’s video diary as a record of the ordeal.
