"At least her last days will be calmer." Irishman Dayton, American Andy and evacuation of Ukrainians

In March, former US Marine Andy Milburn came to Ukraine to cover the war as a freelance journalist. He quickly realized that he wanted to do more, and together with other ex-military men, he organized training for the territorial defense units when there were still Russian positions near Kyiv. After what they saw in Bucha, they decided to stay to help the Ukrainians. This is how The Mozart Group was formed – an organization that trains the military and evacuates civilians from the most dangerous corners of the front.

hromadske spent two days with the evacuation team of The Mozart Group in Bakhmut and Soledar. Diana Butsko learned more about how foreigners with military experience found themselves on a humanitarian mission in Ukraine.

"What are the plans if Russians enter?"

The Mozart Group vehicles cross the Bakhmutka river and enter the part of the town that foreigners call eastern Bakhmut and locals call Zabakhmutka. There is fighting on the outskirts of Zabakhmutka, DeepStateMap marks the territory of the SINIAT plant on this side of the settlement as occupied. Here you can hear and see that the war is close. Outside the car window, houses with smashed roofs are appear one by one, a burnt-out car lies overturned on the side of the road. The volunteers stop near one of the few surviving houses with windows boarded up. Vlada, the translator, knocks on the door and a woman in a red checkered robe comes out.

“Are you a family of six?" she asks.

“No, we are a family of five,” the woman answers. Another resident of this house looks over the threshold.

“They said six. We were asked to bring you humanitarian aid.”

Vlada explains to other members of the team in English that this is the address, and they go to the car to get the packages. While the packages are being carried into the house, Dayton, the translator and head of The Mozart Group's evacuation team, stays to talk to the family. Dayton asks if they want to evacuate. The woman replies that her 80-year-old grandmother lives in the house with them.

“She yells: ‘I will die here’. We cannot do anything with her. She turned 80 yesterday.”

“And what are the plans if the Russians enter the territory? This is Wagner,” Dayton asks.

“We understand everything. Here, four houses away, a kitchen completely burned down yesterday. They had to put it out themselves.”

“Isn't that a reason to leave? You know how close they are,” Dayton persists.

“I have nothing here, I have nothing there.”

“Isn't that all the more reason to leave?" Dayton does not give up.

“The issue of security is one thing, but you can't just stay and die for nothing: neither for a goal, nor for an idea, nor for someone,” Vlada adds to his arguments.

“We have nowhere to go,” another woman says.

During the emotional conversation, one of the women bursts into tears. Dayton continues to explain that the Russians are a kilometer away. He shows a map of the fighting on his phone, which shows the Russians' progress.

"This is yesterday, and this is today," he compares two photos of the map. "They've advanced. Here is your house, and here are the Russians. You really need to leave. They are genuinely advancing every day."

The family promises to think about it. Outside the house, Vlada hugs one of the women and asks her to talk to her grandmother again and try to convince her. Finally, Dayton promises to come back if he has the opportunity. The cautious promises are because the team members don't know if this street will still be unoccupied on their next trip.

Such conversations are part of the job of The Mozart Group's evacuation team, Dayton explains. They almost never take the first 'No' and keep coming back and persuading people in frontline areas to leave. And not only persuade, they try to befriend them. Dayton recalls cases when a family refuses the proposed evacuation today, and tomorrow a shell hits the house and people agree to leave.

"Sometimes you convince them, sometimes, like I said, it's just fear," Dayton explains. He adds that most people do not leave due to lack of money and lack of housing, and the hardest to convince are the elders.

"This is their home, and it is understandable. They are afraid if they leave it, they will never come back," Dayton said.

"It is difficult to find any other organization so different from the Wagner Group"

Irishman Dayton, 43, joined The Mozart Group in May. He spent 22 years in the Irish Army, where he first served as an infantryman and then became a paramedic. After the army, he worked for the OSCE mission in occupied Luhansk, where he provided medical support to the team. In December, he returned home for Christmas, and with the beginning of the invasion, the mission effectively shut down its work in Ukraine. Dayton began looking for other ways to help Ukrainians and learned about The Mozart Group. At first, he trained Azov in Zaporizhzhya and then moved to Donetsk Oblast as head of an evacuation team.

The Mozart Group was founded by 59-year-old former Marine Andy Milburn. Andy served 31 years in the U.S. Army and retired three years ago as the Deputy Chief of Staff in charge of U.S. Special Operations in the Middle East. In the first week of March, he left sunny Florida and came to Ukraine.

"My friend from the Ukrainian army contacted me and said: ‘Andy, we really need your help. We need help with training these guys. They're going into battle with the Russians in a few days, and none of them have ever fired a weapon before. All they have is courage and determination to defend their city’,” says Andy.

Andy could not refuse. Together with other former Marines, he devised a plan, invited coaches from the United States, and they began training territorial defense fighters in Kyiv. For five days, the Americans trained Ukrainian recruits, then they got in their vehicles and drove to the first battle with the Russians. When the Ukrainians won the battle for Kyiv, Andy and his comrades saw Bucha, and it finally convinced them to stay and continue to help the Ukrainians.

"The army teaches self-discipline, allows you to correctly assess the danger, makes you get along with people around you and work in a team," explains Andy.

According to him, he tried to invite police and firefighters to join the team, but only the military are ready to work in the uncertainty of combat.

The ironic name for the organization was suggested by one of his colleagues. He came to Andy and said that everyone around him already called the team "Mozart" – as opposed to PMC "Wagner" – a Russian mercenary company.

"It's hard to find any other organization so different from the Wagner Group. Yes, we are all professional military. This immediately distinguishes us from Wagner. We do not carry weapons. We don't fight. We are not mercenaries. We are not a private military company – we are a volunteer organization," explains Andy.

The Mozart Group did not go unnoticed by the leader of PMC Wagner Yevgeny Prigozhin. He called members of The Mozart Group team "American chieftains". Despite the threats from Wagner, which operates on the Bakhmut axis, Andy Milburn says he will continue his mission because he has found a sense of purpose and met friends here.

"I will die anyway. If it happens, at least I'll die for something I believe in," Andy says when asked about his safety.

"You don't always have another day"

After Zabahmutka, The Mozart Group evacuation team returns to the central part of the town and tries to find the man who applied for evacuation yesterday. Lack of communication complicates the search. The man did not open the door, neighbors have not seen him anywhere. After half an hour of searching, the team members give up – there is still evacuation from Soledar ahead – but promise to return tomorrow. Tomorrow will be too late. The next day, the evacuation workers, having not found the man anywhere, decide to climb into the house through the window. There they will find him dead on the floor. Neighbors say that he had health problems.

"He probably died the day he asked to be evacuated," Dayton guesses. "You don't always have extra days. Your chance to leave may be right now, and if you stay another day, that chance may just not be there anymore."

Such cases happen in frontline towns and villages, especially to lonely people. In their apartments, people die from lack of access to medicine and doctors, healthy food and cold. And in winter, Dayton predicts, more bodies will be found in houses, which are not always buried.

A month later, the murdered man was still lying there

Residents of eastern Bakhmut told The Mozart Group that someone had killed their neighbor. Dayton and his colleagues did not pick up the body, because a crime had been committed, and went to the police station. The police said it was too dangerous for them to go to that part of town, but promised to try to send a service to remove the body. A month later, the murdered man was still lying there.

Although the main task of The Mozart Group is evacuation, at the request of relatives sometimes we had to remove the bodies of the dead. Sometimes the team was asked to check on the relatives who were left without communication in Bakhmut and nearby villages. Once, a daughter asked to visit her mother, with whom there was no communication for several days. The team members found her dead on the floor. The woman asked for her mother's body to be taken to the nearest morgue, from where she was able to pick her up and then bury her.

Sometimes evacuation happens too late. The Mozart Group received a call from a Soledar resident who said that her neighbor needed to be evacuated because she had been lying on the floor for 10 days. When Dayton entered the room, he did not immediately see her as she was so frail and pale. Only her head was visible from under the blanket. The woman said she was in pain. Dayton lifted the blanket and saw that one leg was twisted and gangrene had spread on the other. When she was taken to a hospital in Slovyansk, doctors said the infection had spread throughout her body and she only had a few days left.

"At least she will not die on the floor in her cold apartment. At least these few days will be calmer than the previous ones," Dayton said.

It is this, as well as the lives saved and the gratitude of the people they managed to bring to safety, that inspires them to return to Bakhmut again and again, Dayton says.

The article was published with the support of the Russian Language News Exchange.