‘I survived 471 days in an underground bunker fighting for Ukraine against the Russians. This is my story’
When Serhiy Tyshchenko arrived at the tiny underground mud bunker near Bakhmut, on the front line in eastern Ukraine, Joe Biden was president.
By the time he left, a new US leader was in charge and had largely taken Vladimir Putin’s side. Not only that, Donald Trump was trying to persuade Ukraine to give up the land Serhi had defended for 471 days.
In an extraordinary feat of endurance, Tyshchenko spent more than 16 months underground, close to suffocation, under constant Russian bombardment, suffering hunger, and extreme thirst.
He survived multiple underground mud collapses – yet he emerged and continues to serve close to the front line.
Now 46, he missed two birthdays and all the landmarks in the lives of his five children while, from 13 July 2023 to 28 October 2025, he and his diminishing team dug an underground well for water.
They frantically used homemade sandbags to plug breaches in their bunker day and night as drones fought to get into their cave and kill them.
“Everything is underground. Everything was dug out. There was a trench at the entrance, then a section covered with logs and camouflaged with dirt and sand,” Tyshchenko tells The Independent in Sloviansk.
“Our position was dug right under an asphalt road. So we were limited by the width of the road, but we kept expanding it in length. So it was all underground. We did observation, at first, while it was still possible to go out, and hold the defence.”
His extraordinary stint underground started when, early on in that summer of 2023, he and a comrade were collecting rations from a nearby bunker when they were spotted by a drone, which chased them into a ditch.
They hid behind tall grass. His friend bade him farewell, convinced they were going to die as the drone circled back on them.
Tyshchenko – who goes by the callsign Viter, meaning “wind”, told him to make a dash for the bunker. They both made it. Much worse was to come.
Holding the line in modern drone combat has taken infantry soldiers to new levels of personal endurance. Tyshchenko, a former veterinarian, is the most extreme case of what has become a grinding truth of modern warfare.
Military terms like Forward Line of Enemy Troops, (Flet) and the Forward Lines of Own Troops, (Flot), have been understood for generations. When war goes static and the two sides face off, there’s contested no-man’s land between them.
Now there’s no obvious Flot or Flet, but a zone – often 15km deep – where tiny groups of men on each side flit about a shattered landscape, or more often simply hide from the sight of hunter-killer drones. Old fashioned fighting is minimal – survival is victory.
