Surrounded for five months, the Ukrainian soldier made it out from behind Russian lines in six days

Viktor Svystun, a 37-year-old Ukrainian soldier with the call sign "Bumer," spent five months surrounded in Zaporizhzhia region, where he and his comrades sometimes fought the Russians from as little as five to seven meters away. When it became clear to him that they had been encircled, he decided to resist to the very end: "If things have come to the point where they're going to kill me anyway, then at least let me make my life as costly as possible for the enemy."

They slept two to three hours a day, and rationed their food so that their scarce supplies would last for days. When they had no other food left, they tried to roast pheasants over candle flames burning in the trench. On top of the constant fighting and deprivation, they also had to treat their own wounded, without proper equipment or hospital care.

He had to make one of the most difficult decisions when the arm of his comrade with the call sign "Kocherga" began to rot after being wounded. The tourniquet could not be removed, and Bumer ultimately amputated the injured limb at the elbow joint with a knife. "He couldn't take off the tourniquet. His arm was already in such a state that it had to be cut off at the elbow joint," recalled an officer of the 108th Territorial Defense Brigade.

Meanwhile, the Russians repeatedly called on the encircled soldiers to surrender, dropping messages that read: "You are surrounded, lay down your weapons and go home!" Bumer, however, rejected the possibility of captivity and continued fighting. According to him, he carved a notch into the stock of his assault rifle for every Russian soldier he killed, but once the number exceeded one hundred, he stopped counting. On a captured Russian radio, he later heard his own personal information being read out, along with an order to kill him at any cost.

Over the months, he himself was wounded several times: he was hit by shrapnel, suffered several concussions, and took a bullet in his thigh, which he only found out about after getting out of the encirclement. At first he thought he had developed a boil on his leg, and only later did it become clear what was actually causing the wound. "We dug the shrapnel out ourselves, with a multitool, with a knife. We didn't even need painkillers. The adrenaline after combat suppresses the pain so much that you feel almost nothing," he recounted.

Throughout it all, he kept with him an icon depicting the Virgin Mary, which he had found in a completely burned-down house and which had remained undamaged despite the destruction. The icon served as something to hold onto during those five months: "You feel that there are forces greater than us that help us."

When the opportunity for a breakout finally arose, the group covered sixty kilometers in six days, moving through enemy-controlled territory in Russian uniforms. They pretended to be members of a Russian sabotage unit and in the end made it out without getting into a single fight along the way. Returning home, however, did not put an end to what they had been through: "When I try to fall asleep at night, sometimes I feel like I'm about to wake up and actually still be there. Maybe I still haven't fully grasped that I really made it home."

Bumer would like to pass on his experience to other soldiers in the future, once he can leave the trenches behind for good. Despite everything he went through, he doesn't regret his service in the infantry, because he believes that if he hadn't been there, someone else would have had to take his place. "Someone's son, someone's love. Someone has to do this job."