Grenade launcher from barn, bicycle and curses. Stories of resistance of ordinary people in first days of great war

He threw a bicycle at a tank

A man throws his bicycle at an enemy tank — the armored vehicle crushes the two-wheeler and goes on. The same thing happens with the second tank. The man rests his hands on the next one and climbs on top of it. The whole convoy stops. This happened on February 26, 2022.

This video of the then 55-year-old Serhii Shevchenko went viral on social media. The construction worker from Bakhmach, Chernihiv Oblast, became a hero who inspired Ukrainians in the first days of Russia's full-scale invasion.

In addition to fame, he now has a new bicycle, a certificate from the local authorities, and a souvenir coin “Bakhmach Resistance on February 26, 2022. Serhii Shevchenko” — a coin depicting a man leaning against a tank with his bare hands.

That day, a column of Russian armored vehicles was passing through the small town of Bakhmach. Few people knew about it, but the locals ran out into the street as soon as they heard the terrible rumble. They stood and watched.

When Serhii learned about it from his wife, he immediately jumped on his bike and rode into the city center. His anger grew. He saw the young occupiers on the tank's turret — they were sitting and smiling arrogantly: they said it was a stroll, a game for them. Serhii felt that his anger had reached a boiling point. Furious, he threw what he had at hand — a bicycle. The heavy equipment turned it into a pancake, running over it twice. But the man picked it up again and threw it a second time, then a third. And then he climbed up on a tank.

Later, his fellow town people asked him how he did it. They wouldn't even know where to put their foot on a tank. Serhii knew because he was a tank commander in the army.

“In the army, we were taught: if you don't see anything, stop.” So he took a T-shirt and covered the gap in the manhole with it.

The crew commander was sitting on the tank — he fired upwards and then pointed his rifle at the Bakhmach resident.

“Go ahead and shoot!” Serhii shouted at him, “Why did you come here? Who called you here?” But he said it “swearing, of course, in our Ukrainian way,” theman laughs.

At that moment, Serhii involuntarily removed his T-shirt from the window, and the tank moved. The man had to jump off.

“I realized later that he could have shot me, but I didn't think about it at that moment. I put the bike on the An infantry fighting vehicle is a large armored all-terrain vehicle whose main function is to support fire on the battlefield, and can also transport soldiers.IFV and it drove off with it. They dumped my bike near the police station.”

What was Serhii Shevchenko thinking about as he walked home?

He didn't want his wife to know anything! He didn't tell her anything. And when she asked about the bike, he said it was broken. But the video of Serhii was already on the Internet: some woman filmed it all on her phone. It was shown on The name of a joint telethon that has been running on most national channels since the start of the full-scale invasion.“United News”. So his wife took over and ordered him: “Don't leave the yard.”

And he didn't really want to. As soon as he did, everyone would recognize him:“Greetings to the heroes!”, “Look, the uncle from TV!”. Even at the market, they let him through without waiting in line. Serhii had too much attention, and now people have finally “calmed down”.

Instead of the old bike, which he still keeps as a memento, a friend gave him his own. Later, the local authorities and one of the farmers gave him a better one with an electric motor. This is the bike he uses to get to his new job: he works as an operator at a feed mill.

I ask him, has he always been so desperate and fought for justice?

“I’m short-tempered. In Bakhmach, everyone my age knows me, because I was a bully in my youth,” helaughs awkwardly.

Serhii was most angry when several men attacked one. He always intervened.

“I didn't allow it. I did sports, wrestling.”

And in his youth, he was walking home from a dance club at night when he saw three hooligans picking on a student who was on her way home from school.

“So I stood up for her,” and in this “stood up for her” you hear something that makes your skin crawl: what did he do to them? He keeps silent. He walked the girl home, got acquainted with her and they... got married. She became Serhii's first wife.

The story of the bicycle was also useful for the Ukrainian military, as they saw on the video what kind of equipment was going and where it was going. The Russian convoy was eventually bombed near Nizhyn. So there is a contribution from a simple Ukrainian man from Bakhmach.

Now he travels to the front line as a volunteer with humanitarian aid.

“Some people don't go because they are afraid, but I don't think about it. Our soldiers are far from home, from their families, they have children and parents. We need to help them.”

Alone against a column of Russian armored vehicles

Vokzalna Street stretches from the railway station in Bucha to the entrance to Irpin. From there, it's only a few kilometers to the capital's Novobilychi neighborhood. It was along this street that a column of Russian armored vehicles moved from Bucha to Kyiv on February 27, 2022.

When the Russians reached house number 19, someone suddenly fired a grenade launcher at the convoy. Then F-1 hand-held fragmentation grenade. It was named “lemon” during the First World War because of its resemblance to the British Lemon grenade.“lemons” flew at the occupiers.

The convoy was stopped by a 64-year-old pensioner. In addition to this independent attack, he passed information to the Ukrainian checkpoint in Irpin and adjusted our artillery’s fire at the Russians.

The man kept the last grenade for himself. Although the occupiers passed half a meter away, the “lemon” clutched in his palm was not useful.

“It is a mistake to think that only the Armed Forces should fight. Everyone can become a defender — even an elderly civilian like me. You just need to set yourself up, not to relax. Otherwise, this war will never end,” Valentyn Didkivskyi emphasizes in a conversation with hromadske. Two years have passed since his attack on the Russian convoy, but the man is not aging at heart and stubbornly finds tasks for himself in the local territorial defense.

Valentyn's house can be identified from afar: a Ukrainian flag flies near the yard. The man meets me at the gate and carefully examines my accreditation card from the Ministry of Defense: the war has taught him to be vigilant.

Valentyn was born this way: you don't have to ask him to do good things, he knows how to find them. During the Revolution of Dignity, he went to the Maidan, and with the beginning of Russian aggression he became a volunteer: he used his van to deliver food, underwear, A small, often home-made, metal stove for heating rooms and cooking.potbelly stoves and various equipment to the front line. He took the dead out of the combat zone and delivered their bodies to their parents in Kyiv region, to Zhytomyr, Rivne, Lviv, and Ivano-Frankivsk. Soldiers along the contact line from Shyrokyne in Donetsk Oblast to Stanytsia Luhanska knew Did. The volunteer community in Irpin and Bucha also knew him.

Although Valentyn had suffered a severe stroke a year before the Great War, no one asked him about his age or health when he enlisted in the Irpin territorial defense in January 2022. Along with other young people, he patrolled the streets of the suburban villages, kept an eye on roads and buildings, and guarded economic facilities.

The day before the convoy passed his street, the man had just finished his shift in the territorial defense and came home to Bucha to spend the night.

According to Valentyn, he was not given weapons in the territorial defense. He had his own pistol that fired rubber bullets. But the man also had “serious” weapons: he hid Also known as the "Fly" is a single-use rocket-propelled grenade launcher designed to combat armored vehicles and enemy forces in cover.RPG-18 and two and several lemon grenades in his garage “just in case”.

“Don't ask me where I got them. I won't tell you. They came to me here and asked. So I told them to get off. What is war like for a man without weapons?” Valentyn keeps a secret.

Early in the morning on February 27, he heard a distant rumble. He went outside the gate: Russian vehicles were moving down the street from the railroad. “I used to work as a taxi driver, I have an instant reaction.” He rushed to the garage, prepared his grenade launcher for battle, and put the fuse in the grenades.

There was a trailer near the high fence that separated the yard from the street, so Valentyn climbed on it and surreptitiously looked around. While he was fiddling around in the garage, three armored personnel carriers had already passed by his house, and a fourth was on its way. Behind it was a gasoline tanker. Armed Russians were walking along the sidewalks on both sides of the street.

“I immediately thought of our guys from the checkpoint at the entrance to Irpin. There were only a dozen of them there. And they had almost no weapons — one or two assault riffles, some kind of hunting A single-shot rifle developed in the 1870s.Berdan rifle. Later the guys said they had another RPG. But it's a tiny thing, there was such a convoy coming at them! At first, I wanted to call the checkpoint to warn them, but then I realized that the fuel truck had to be refueled. I decided to hit it. None of the Russians paid any attention to my fence. I pressed an RPG to it and fired. Then I started throwing grenades. Then something told me to keep one grenade for myself. I heard the explosions and stopped looking at what was happening on the street, because the Russians started shooting in the direction of my house.”

With a grenade clutched in his hand for himself, Valentyn crawled along his fence — the fence was on the foundation, and it protected him from Russian bullets. The Russians pierced the house in several places and damaged the roof.“My parents' house took all the shots that were supposed to kill me, as well as the fence. I looked at it later: the holes from the shots were at the level of a person's chest. They were shooting deliberately to kill me for sure.”

Valentyn crawled across the yard and rushed into the narrow passage between the garage and the barn, trying to get out through the garden to another street. But the Russians were already behind the vegetable garden.

“I don't know where I got the strength to knock a piece of corrugated board out of the neighbor's yard fence with my shoulder, but I did. I jumped into the neighbors' yard and heard that the Russians were already in my yard, in my garden. Where to go? I ran to the neighbor's restroom, stood behind the doorjamb, and stuck my finger into the grenade ring.

If they come in, I'll throw it under my feet. And do you know what saved me? The fact that I didn't lock the door to the restroom. The orcs passed by and didn't look in the open door! They were screaming and swearing. And then, I don't know where he came from, who he was, but some man ran into this neighbor's yard — probably wanted to hide, and the Russians killed him. They probably thought he was the one who shot.”

And when the neighborhood quieted down, Valentyn called our checkpoint. He said that there was a convoy heading to Irpin down Vokzalna Street and that they have to inform the Armed Forces.

“After about 7-10 minutes, our troops attacked this column. The houses on the street were damaged, but the column was destroyed. It did not reach either Irpin or Kyiv, it took half an hour, but during this half hour our people in Irpin managed to pull themselves together. My street was damaged, but imagine what this column would have done in Irpin and Kyiv if it had reached there! How many people would have died?” Valentyn recalls.

His house, like all the other houses on the street, is now very elegant. Along the road, there are neatly paved sidewalks, young trees fenced in, and a gas pipeline with meters. The street was rebuilt with the money of American billionaire Warren Buffett, the eVidnovlennia program, and the personal savings of Vokzalna residents. Today, only holes in the fences between the neighboring gardens remind of those events two years ago.

She scolded the Russians at their checkpoint

Amateur video shows people in Russian military uniforms behind the window of a car. Female voiceover: “We were stopped at a checkpoint by unknown people with red stripes — they demanded to see our documents and open the trunk. On what grounds? I don't understand”.

A masked soldier approaches the author of the video and the driver, who showed herself for a second (a blonde woman in a black jacket and hat).

“Show me your face. Why should I show my passport to the terrorists?” the woman challenges him.

For several minutes, she shouts at the man, frantically and fiercely: “I was born in Ukraine on this native land. Do you realize that? Why did you come to kill my parents, my children? Why did you come here with weapons? I am a citizen of Ukraine, and everyone here knows me. According to the Constitution of Ukraine, I can travel here without a passport!”

The soldier replies with restraint: “Calm down, don't freak out.” Eventually, the woman is released.

The heroine of the video is Olha Ros from Rohyntsi, Sumy region. On February 27, 2022, she was not afraid to fight back against the Russian invaders.

“That day, I left the house already wound up,” says 40-year-old Olha, “My child came under fire, and I could do nothing.”

On the eve of the invasion, she sent 13-year-old Artur to his father in Kyiv. She and Artur’s father are divorced. On February 24, she spoke to him on the phone: “Mom, everything is exploding around me! I'm scared!” A tank factory, a military unit, an airfield, and a military training center were on fire near his house. At dawn, his father was called to work, he was evacuating the residents of Irpin. “Son, where are you?” — “I'm on the balcony.”

And then the connection was lost.

"I was worried, I was confused — I dialed him, but he didn't answer me. There is no way to get to him. Everything is blocked, and no transport is running. I don't know how I survived that day.

When he called back in the evening and said: ‘Mom, everything is fine, I'm going to Lviv,’ I calmed down a bit. But I began to hate the Katsaps so much for that day that I would have shot them all,” thewoman says.

The Russians did not enter her village, which is located in the lowlands from the highway. They moved along old roads that locals no longer use because new ones have been built.

But she could see the enemy. About a kilometer away from her house, there was a convoy of fuel trucks, and military vehicles further on. They got a little lost and drowned in the local swamps, and then someone helped them. Olha thinks so because she went out with her friends to block the roads by cutting down trees. However, someone warned the enemies, and they avoided the trap.

In the first days after the invasion, the locals had already found out where the enemy had set up their posts and did not go there, looking for other ways. Olia, on the other hand, went there on purpose to express everything she thought about them.

“I went to Romny. I ran out of diesel, and without it, I can't start the tractor, and I can't lift a 300-kilogram bale of hay. I went to look for it.”

The woman lives with her two children, cultivates the land herself, and raises pigs. She was stopped by young Russian soldiers from Buryatia, who blocked her car and asked for her passport. None of them understood Ukrainian. The occupier, whom Olia filmed on video, was the fourth to approach her. He understood her, so she realized that he was the one in charge.

“I filmed to show our people what was happening at the checkpoint because everyone was afraid to go there. I was surprised that the fourth guy didn't raise his voice at me or swear. I was shouting in his face, filming, and he remained polite.”

Eventually, the woman was let through. She couldn't find any diesel fuel, so she returned the same way. They stopped her again and asked her to open the trunk. She refused, so one of the soldiers started pulling it himself.

“I opened the door and said: ‘I'm going to break you myself.’ He jumped away.”

I ask if Olia wasn't afraid, because her younger son, seven-year-old Vania, was also in the car with her.

“I was scared, of course, I'm a normal person,” shelaughs. “I was constantly thinking about the kid. If it wasn't for him, I would have started fighting. My thoughts were spinning: how to take away their guns and shoot them all. I was ready to tear them apart with my teeth.”

The woman showed the video to her sister, who posted it online. It quickly collected 12 thousand comments. Most admired the Ukrainian woman's courage. They asked if she was alive.

Meanwhile, Olia decided on another adventure. After the Russians robbed a car with bread near the village (they took some of it and destroyed the rest), she encouraged some guys she knew to go. They said,“Let's go and take their machine guns, and they won't catch up with us because they are without diesel fuel.”

The woman thought out a detailed plan of where and how they would enter. Everyone agreed. But then she received a call from the territorial defense:“We heard that you are going to do some more trouble there. Don't even think about it! The consequences will be disastrous!”

“In principle, it would have happened this way,” Olia reflects, “There was a similar story. There was also a checkpoint near another village. And so the Ukrainians decided to harm the Katsaps. The guys lay down, picked up some assault rifles, and started shooting at the tank. And it turned around and hit them! He knocked off the head of an 18-year-old boy, and the rest of them started running away: some into the ditch, some through the garden. And they followed and shot the gas station four times, smashing it completely.”

She says that the guys had no plan, and she knows better than to ambush them and throw A simple home-made incendiary weapon in a glass bottle based on a flammable mixture. It was named after the Finnish partisans who used to tease the head of the USSR government, Molotov, with it.Molotov cocktails at their tank.

I ask her if she is generally combative in life, and Olia laughs.

“Yes, I am. Many people don't like me for telling the truth. But I live by this principle and have no regrets.”

She recalls walking with her friend and her brother. Unidentified men came from somewhere and hit the young man on the head with a brick, knocking him unconscious. His sister, who stood up for him, had her nose broken. It was then that Olia grabbed one of the attackers and broke his arm and nose. The police arrived.“Wait, guys, I've only just started, I'll smash his head in!” she told them. They listened to the story of the fight: “Call a taxi, miss, take your friends away! We never saw you!”

The fearless woman admits that she was going to go to the front. She ran to her mother:“Take the kid away!”. But the mother understood everything and answered cunningly: “I'm going away, I won't be here, I can't!”. So Olia stayed behind.