26 days in ICU: A Ukrainian rescuer’s fight for life after Russia’s follow-up strike on Kyiv

Snizhana received the video from Vitaliy at 1:55 a.m., then from 2:55 a.m., he stopped answering. Until 6 a.m. Snizhanna searched online for videos from that address but saw nothing. She kept calling and writing – but to no avail. In the morning, her phone rang. It was a call from the State Emergency Service: “I only asked: is he alive?”

Snizhana’s husband is one of five rescuers wounded in the follow-up Shahed strike on 16 Bazhana. All were hospitalized, and three — including Snizhana’s husband — in serious condition. During the first 24 hours in the hospital, Vitaliy’s heart stopped twice.

Vitaliy has now spent 26 days in serious condition in intensive care. At home, his wife and three children await him; the youngest boy is three months old. Vitaliy was the family’s sole breadwinner. Now Snizhana is raising money for his treatment and rehabilitation.

"I will not quit my job"

We enter the Kachuros’ apartment, where the little boy almost immediately wants to be picked up. His name is Vitaliy, after his father. Two-year-old Vitaliy is the couple's middle son; the youngest, Andriy, is three months old, and the oldest daughter, Emiliya, is six years old. She attends kindergarten. Within half an hour of our visit, she comes over for hugs too. I am genuinely surprised by how open the children are to a stranger.

“They are all as open as their dad. They miss his attention so much right now,” Snizhana explains.

At home, Vitaliy always tried to spend time with the children. He sang them lullabies at night. To support the family, besides his State Emergency Service job, he worked two more. He and his wife also ran a greenhouse. On a small plot inherited from his grandfather, not far from the apartment, the couple built a hothouse. They grow tomatoes there, and in the garden nearby — apples, pears, plums, and raspberries.

"He loves everything homemade—he even wanted to get chickens! And I told him, ‘Chickens? We already have three kids and a dog—where would we even put chickens?’" Snizhana says, laughing.

Vitaliy rushed to his State Emergency Service job like it was a date: “Like he was going to meet someone. I was even jealous,” Snizhana says with a smile. “I love my job so much. It is my family,” her husband would tell her constantly.

Vitaliy joined the State Emergency Service in 2010. For eight years, he was a rescuer, but when the children were born, he switched to driver, so the schedule would be a bit easier: one day on, three days at home.

“With the guys in his unit, they are great friends. They help each other. Someone is building a house — they all get together and pitch in,” Snizhana says.

When they have free time at work, they train, work out, and play soccer. But since the full-scale invasion began, the job changed and became riskier: “They all have families at home that they leave to go to work. As he told me: ‘I am a rescuer, this is my job. If they tell me to walk into fire — I will.’”

When the situation in Kyiv worsened, and drones constantly flew over Boryspil with strikes landing nearby, Snizhana asked Vitaliy to take the family abroad. With three children, he had the legal right, but her husband refused: “I will not quit my job.”

"I come alive when I visit him"

Vitaliy did not want to respond to the call overnight into January 9. They had just received a new big ladder truck. Snizhana was surprised: a new truck, and he does not want to go out.

“He seemed to sense something,” she recalls.

On the morning of January 9, as Snizhana travelled to her husband in the hospital, she was told he had a broken arm and leg. She brought clothes for discharge. “Probably so I would make it to the hospital alive,” she says.

“When they moved him from one ICU to another, I realized something was wrong. I sat outside the doors until evening,” Snizhana adds.

Fragments from the follow-up Shahed attack damaged Vitaliy’s body so severely: internal bleeding occurred, vertebral arches were severed, and the spine displaced; he suffered severe injuries to internal organs and a closed craniocerebral trauma.

“He still does not feel his legs. In the photos the doctors showed me, you can see huge wounds on his body, internal organs, and a lung. Those wounds are healing slowly now. He had jaundice. He lost two liters of blood. Because of that, his internal organs compressed and his heart stopped twice while they were transporting him to the ICU,” Snizhana recounts.

After January 9, Snizhana’s life froze. Days stopped moving. Every day, she travels from Boryspil to Kyiv to the hospital to see her husband, mostly on her own. The couple’s mothers take turns coming to help Snizhana with the children and the dog.

“I come alive when I visit him. It makes me happy that he is now in a more or less stable condition. The doctors saved him. He opens his eyes, reacts to my voice. When he hears his mom’s voice, tears appear,” Snizhana says.

The daughter keeps asking when daddy is coming home: “I told her in ten days. Good thing she cannot count yet, so our ten days last longer.” Emiliya records herself singing the lullabies that Snizhana then plays for Vitaliy in the hospital.

“I have to hold on — there is no other way. I have three children and a husband who needs to get back on his feet. We are all waiting for him so much,” Snizhana says.