Viktor Svystun held his position for five months. This is his story.
Viktor (“Boomer”) is 37 years old, a former special forces officer who deliberately chose the infantry after the full-scale invasion began – because he wanted to be where the fighting was hardest. He ended up surrounded in a village on the Zaporizhzhia front with a small group of soldiers, cut off from his unit for five months. He came out in early June.
When it became clear they were encircled, Viktor made a decision. “If I’m going to be killed anyway,” he said, “then the price of my life for the enemy must be very high.” He started marking each confirmed enemy kill with a notch on his rifle stock. After the count passed one hundred, he stopped keeping track.
When a fellow soldier – a man named Kocherha from the 225th assault battalion – developed gangrene from a tourniquet that couldn’t be removed, Viktor amputated his arm at the elbow with a combat knife. No anesthesia. In the trench. He saved the man’s life. Viktor himself was carrying shrapnel wounds, multiple concussions, and a bullet in his thigh he didn’t know about until after he got out – he thought it was a boil.
Russian drones dropped water bottles with notes attached: “Surrender. You are surrounded. Walk out with a white flag and go home.” Not one Ukrainian soldier did. When food ran out they hunted wild pheasants and cooked them over trench candles. The meat stayed nearly raw. It was enough to survive.
When the breakout order finally came, they walked for six days, covering sixty kilometers in a zigzag pattern through active minefields, disguised in Russian uniforms, moving along Russian routes, doing everything possible to avoid contact. Before leaving, Viktor mined the entire position – anti-tank mines, tripwires, Claymores.
He is now in rehabilitation. “When I try to sleep at night,” he says, “I wake up thinking I’m still there. I still can’t fully believe I’m actually home.”
These are the people defending Ukraine.
(Source: Ukrainska Pravda, June 26, 2026.)