Escape from Mariupol: how one Ukrainian soldier fled the Azovstal steelworks against the odds | Ukraine

It was May 2022 and Oleksandr Ivantsov was trapped. The Russians had seized the city of Mariupol. A small island of territory, the Azovstal steelworks, remained under Ukrainian control. For weeks, Ivantsov and his fellow soldiers had lived in a network of underground shelters, shared with a few civilians. Now this grim subterranean existence was coming to an end.

The complex’s food supplies had run out. Russian bombs fell continuously. There was no prospect of escape. Vladimir Putin had ordered a blockade so tight “that a fly can’t get through”. Under pressure from Kyiv the Ukrainian garrison, composed of 2,500 service personnel, some of them gravely wounded, had reluctantly agreed to surrender. The alternative was certain death.

Or was it? As his battalion prepared to go into Russian captivity, Ivantsov came up with an extraordinary plan. “I decided to hide,” he said. Instead of surrendering he would disappear, and take his chances, in the hope he could somehow make it back to Ukrainian-controlled territory, many miles away. “I put the probability of success at 1 in 1,000,” the 29-year-old admitted. “Everyone thought I was mad.”

He explained: “I understood that the Russians would consider me a traitor. That meant my treatment would be worse.” Ivanstov grew up in the city of Luhansk in the east of Ukraine, close to the Russian border. A pro-Ukrainian activist, he fled in 2014 when Russian-backed separatists occupied the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine in what was a precursor to the full-scale invasion that began in 2022.

He added: “Our commander said conditions would be OK. I’d read about Soviet gulags. I knew Russia’s prison system would be harsher.”

On 16 May 2022, Ivantsov and another soldier decided to stay behind. They scoured the plant and found a hiding place at the end of a tunnel, reachable by crawling. They filled it with supplies – an old mattress, tins of sardines, sachets of tea and coffee and 15 bottles of hand sanitiser. This could be used as fuel; it burned without giving off smoke or a smell.

Members of the Azov brigade gave him a watch with a compass and a flashlight. Three days later, on 19 May, the final group of soldiers left the site. “My commander shook me by the hand and wished me luck. I’m sure he thought I would die,” Ivantsov said.

At the last minute the other soldier who had agreed to hide changed his mind and joined the troops going to the surface. Ivantsov was on his own. “I was ready for death,” he said.

He shuffled into the subterranean hole. All was silent. The next day he heard the sound of ghostly footsteps, coming from somewhere above him. The Russians had arrived and were searching the plant. They didn’t find him. His idea was to stay underground for 10 days. But after a week – feeling increasingly unwell and suffering from diarrhoea – he decided it was time to go. He put on civilian clothes.

That evening, 26 May, Ivantsov emerged into the darkness. There was a starry sky, and around him the ruined steelworks and Mariupol’s pulverised left bank. “I knew the Russians would be careful for the first few days. After that they would slowly relax,” he said. In the distance, enemy soldiers sat around a brazier. They seemed in good spirits. The sound of laughter floated towards him, he recalled.

Ivantsov followed a railway track which ran along the perimeter of the industrial zone. His goal was the city centre. He ducked between train carriages and kept going. Eventually he reached a residential district. He had prepared a story, in case Russian soldiers stopped him: he was a sailor who had come to Mariupol to find his mother, who had gone missing. By way of proof he had entry stamps on his Ukrainian passport.

What happened next is to be revealed in a book Ivantsov will publish next year. For now, he merely says that his gamble worked. The Russians failed to discover that he had been in Azovstal or had served with Ukraine’s armed forces. After an odyssey through the occupied south he managed to cross back into Kyiv-controlled territory. He returned on 6 June 2022 – to be reunited with his stunned family.

Ivantsov appears to be one of only two Azovstal defenders who avoided the horrors of Russian detention. About 2,000 remain captive. Fifty were blown up and murdered in an explosion last year at a prison camp in Olenivka, near occupied Donetsk, including one of his friends. Those who have been released in prisoner exchanges speak of torture by their Russian guards, starvation and abuse.

Speaking in Kyiv, Ivantsov said he had written his remarkable story of survival, entitled Flashback Mariupol, because it was “cool”. Some details could almost have come from a Hollywood thriller. He joined the Azov brigade in 2015, soon after it pushed pro-Russian rebels out of Mariupol. He lived in the city for five years, got married and had a son, then moved back to Kyiv and civilian life. Bored, he worked for a British company that provided security to merchant shipping vessels. His job was to deter attacks from Somali pirates.

When Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine he was floating in the Indian Ocean. By the time he got home, 19 days later, via Egypt and the Suez canal, the Russians had swept over southern Ukraine and surrounded Mariupol.

He had rejoined Azov in Kyiv and was offered a one-way ticket into the besieged city. “I had to help my friends. They were my family,” he explained. On 25 March 2022 he and 30 other volunteers set off from Dnipro in two Mi-8 transport helicopters. Their destination was Azovstal. They brought anti-tank weapons – NLAWs and Matadors – medicines, and Starlink communication systems.

“We landed near a slag heap. It was cold. We took everything out and then loaded badly injured guys into the helicopter. Some had lost limbs. It was a dangerous spot. The helicopter flew off straight away.” Ivantsov was fortunate. His flight, the second into Azovstal, and the first to deliver reinforcements, returned safely. The Russians shot down later evacuation missions, killing everyone on board.

By this point the Russians had penetrated the city. There was street-to-street fighting. Ivantsov was sent to defend a university building, close to Mariupol’s drama theatre, where women and children had been killed in a devastating Russian airstrike the previous week, on 16 March 2022. “I was with three guys. When they went across a road I followed and got shot between the fingers. I lost my weapon and took cover.”

That night Ivantsov retrieved his Kalashnikov. A Russian sniper had killed his sergeant, whose call-sign was “Arki”. He retrieved Arki’s map and walkie-talkie and retreated to a house. Nine Ukrainian soldiers were inside. Five of them wanted to give up. “Their morale was pretty low,” Ivantsov said. “I had come to Mariupol to fight. I decided there was no point in being a prisoner.”

Ivantsov and another fighter left the group and climbed through a window into a neighbouring building. Russian armoured vehicles roamed outside. Hours later enemy troops arrived and the pair heard them take the other Ukrainian soldiers captive. “They started beating them,” Ivantsov said. In darkness the two men slipped across the road into Italian Street.

A Russian soldier spotted them and asked: “Who are you?” He replied in Russian: “Nashi” – literally “ours”, meaning he was with the Russian military. The voice replied: “OK. Come here and we will check.”

Ivantsov said: “I saw a silhouette and fired off my whole magazine. The shape fell to the ground.” With his colleague he crawled through a fence and ran. For the next three days they moved at night, creeping through gardens and private houses.

At dawn one morning a woman fed them a bowl of soup. “She didn’t inform on us,” Ivanstov said. Finally, they reached a Ukrainian command point, located in a fish can factory, only to discover its defenders had just left. “They abandoned their coffee. It was warm. We ate their Snickers bars and decided to keep going.” They set off towards Azovstal.

There were further adventures. To get to Azovstal meant crossing the city’s freezing Kalmius river, twice. At the port Ivantsov found an inflatable. He took a video, sitting inside the flimsy contraption, as the other soldier paddled. “He’s one of the bravest people I know. He’s in Russian jail,” Ivantsov said. “I understood we had to make the journey. I filmed in case we didn’t make it.”

When they reached the other bank the Ukrainians – thinking the pair were Russians – shelled them. They jogged across a forest path and found another boat. When they reached the Azovstal site they put their hands in the air. It was 30 March. Ivantsov rejoined Azov and was assigned to a group led by an officer called “Onyx”. They rotated with a second unit nicknamed “communists”.

One of Ivantsov’s tasks was to deliver food and ammunition across the sprawling site, under fire and on foot. Another was to dig out victims of airstrikes. “Russian aviation was extremely accurate,” he said. On 9 May a bomb flattened an underground shelter, killing nine. Fifteen hours later Ivantsov freed the only survivor. In another incident he helped drag out two trapped soldiers from under rubble using rope.

Ivanstov has little sympathy with the Russians who gave their lives in Mariupol for Putin’s “special military operation”. On patrol he saw an enemy soldier peering out of a first-floor window with night goggles. The company’s sniper killed the man, and another Russian who turned on a torch. Ukrainian servicemen died too. Ivanstov photographed the bunker “hospital” where medics treated patients.

In the future Ivanstov wants to visit America and cycle across Africa. But in the meantime he is fighting on the eastern front, as part of a drone team working near the city of Bakhmut. “I don’t consider myself a hero. I’m lucky,” he said. “It’s thanks to the guys in prison that I was able to escape”.

• Luke Harding’s book Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival, shortlisted for the Orwell prize, is published by Guardian Faber