"There aren't many fools in the army, but they're very cleverly positioned." The story of a Hero of Ukraine who flew missions to Azovstal and Snake Island
What does a person who is far removed from army aviation know about helicopters in wartime?
Movie buffs will recall the iconic scene from Apocalypse Now – helicopters gliding across the sky in perfect formation to Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries. Fighting to any other soundtrack would seem almost disrespectful.
Those who follow MilTech innovations and the defence markets will remember the news about an unmanned helicopter recently developed by the Americans that can fly for 14 hours without refuelling, is remotely controlled via tablet, and can carry six Himars rockets.
But how about destroying the enemy in the 21st century in a Mi-8 – a Soviet transport helicopter from the mid-1960s, designed for carrying people and cargo, with no onboard missile protection system or friend-or-foe radar, and bolted-on armament?
How do you like that, Francis Ford Coppola and Elon Musk?
"You feel like you're in a Kamaz truck or a GAZon that was designed for something else, but you've bolted on some turret with machine guns or a seeder. That's more or less how it is," smiles Yevhen Soloviov. The 35-year-old pilot and Hero of Ukraine, who has taken part in UN peacekeeping operations in Africa, the ATO/JFО, and helicopter missions to Azovstal and Snake Island, knows a lot more about carrying out combat missions in a Mi-8 today than he wants (or is allowed) to tell. [The ATO or Anti-Terrorist Operation is a term used from 2014 to 2018 to identify combat action in parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts against Russian military forces and pro-Russian separatists. The JFO (Joint Forces Operation) replaced the term in 2018 – ed.]
This is the story of Yevhen Soloviov, a senior flight safety inspector in the Army Aviation Flight Safety Service of the Ukrainian Ground Forces.
For him it all began in the mid-1990s, when as a child he used to stand near the pilots' smoking shelter at the airfield in Kazakhstan where his father was serving.
Beginnings: the path to the sky
Is it possible for a boy from a family where two generations of men have devoted their lives to army aviation to dream of another path? It is, but that wasn't the case for Yevhen Soloviov.
Yevhen's grandfather was an aircraft equipment engineer. He served in Afghanistan during the Soviet military invasion. He was wounded and later lost his sight. He never spoke to his grandson about the war.
Yevhen's father graduated from the Perm Aviation School during the Soviet era and served in Kazakhstan.
His uncle, an onboard aircraft technician, flew Mi-8 helicopters and also fought in Afghanistan. He now lives near St Petersburg. Up until 2014, he and his nephew kept in touch; after 2014, they argued, and then the connection was lost.
"I spoke to him in spring 2014. I said, 'Your Mi-35s are flying over Crimea.' And he replied, 'That's nonsense, Zhenia. It can't be – our guys aren't there.' In the spring of 2015, the Russian propaganda film Crimea: The Way Home came out. I called him and said: 'Watch the film – were your guys there?' That was our last conversation."
Yevhen was born in Kherson, but until 1999 he lived with his parents near Aktyubinsk, Kazakhstan. Everything he saw around him was part of the military base.
"My father used to cycle to the airfield. I remember going with him, sitting on the frame, and spending the whole day there. Standing and watching the pilots by the smoking area through the metal fence.
I liked it when the MiG-21s landed and released their rear brake parachutes. And of course the smell of the airfield – kerosene above all. That's my favourite smell, though my wife really hates it. When I come back from a rotation or from flights, she says to me in the hall: 'Stop right there, take your clothes off and put them in a plastic bag – they're going straight in the wash.'"
In 1999 the aviation unit where Yevhen's father served was disbanded, and the family moved to the city of Kherson, where his grandparents lived. Yevhen would perform aerobatic manoeuvres on an Il-2 attack aircraft – on a computer simulator – and watch aviation films; everything about it fascinated him.
By the time Yevhen had finished school and came to choose a career, Ukrainian army aviation, like the rest of the armed forces, was in crisis. Pilots were stuck on the ground without fuel or flight practice, and they were paid a pittance.
"My father asked me, 'What do you really want – to finish university, qualify as a pilot and stay on the ground, or to fly?' Of course, I wanted to fly.
There were Army Aviation helicopters based at a unit in Chornobaivka near Kherson. My dad found out that they were earning money for the state when they were used in UN peacekeeping missions. The people earned a little, too, when they went on rotations abroad."
A few years later, when Yevhen felt what it's like to lift a 10-tonne metal machine into the sky, he would tell his father: "If I get paid to do this, it'll be the best job in the world." His dad reassured him, "You will get paid."
But first came the years of training at Kharkiv Air Force University.
Yevhen recalls his initial shock at the harshness of cadet life: "You live in the barracks, for the first six months there's no leave at all, you're not allowed out anywhere.
There were 120 people on the course, all together in one room. Before that, I'd been boxing for eight years, training morning and evening, with a strict routine and a particular group of people. It was such a contrast – all sorts of people. Some of them drank, some did soft drugs, and because of that all 120 of us ended up in trouble – no one was given leave. The hardest thing for me was this diversity of people," he explains.
One of the lessons Yevhen remembered for life came from pilot and instructor Serhii Ostapenko, who tried to explain that flying is above all hard work. "A lot of people couldn't grasp that back then. Work? It's like Disneyland. You take off into the sky – amazing!" Yevhen smiles.
The first flights brought even the most daring romantics among the future fighter, attack and transport pilots firmly back down to earth.
"The first solo flight was in the fourth year. The only thing I remember is that it was incredibly noisy, and I couldn't understand how it was even possible to do anything in such conditions.
It's probably like your first parachute jump, when you don't understand anything at all. Everything's multiplied by the 'what-the-hell-is-going-on' coefficient. Then for a while you're like a bear cub that's been taught to ride a unicycle – you do everything the way you were taught, but you still barely understand what's happening."
Yevhen graduated from university with honours and returned to his native Kherson.
"When I went out with girls in 11th grade, I used to tell them I'd be flying to Africa – elephants, giraffes and all that. And from my first year at university onwards, I always said I was from Kherson and I'd be going back there, 100%. And that's how it turned out."
Ahead lay the Africa of his dreams, the elephants and the giraffes – but with a few twists.
Someone else's war and our own war
"Nobody asks to go to war, but nobody says no to it either." That's what they say in the 11th Army Aviation Brigade, where Yevhen Soloviov went to serve after graduating.
The first war in his life was someone else's. Three months after graduating from the aviation institute, Yevhen became a crew commander. And six months later, together with other Ukrainian helicopter crews, he was sent to Africa as a pilot navigator with a UN peacekeeping mission in the Congo.
"2013. I went there to fly, to see the elephants, and to earn some money. And it was sort of like Call of Duty. Illegal armed groups were trying to seize the city of Goma. Our camp was shelled with mortars. Mi-24s were flying, firing on the hills – they'd shoot, land, reload, and take off again.
Roads in terrible condition, spray-painted walls, African soldiers in uniform standing around with automatic rifles, red-eyed because smoking a little weed when you're in the military is normal for them."
It was there that Yevhen narrowly avoided a crash for the first time while carrying out a mission – another part of the invaluable experience that you can't gain at Chornobaivka airfield with no fuel.
"I arrived in the summer, and in February, I crashed my first helicopter. Going on transport missions in the mountains is extremely difficult. Turbulence, wind shear, and the weather changes very quickly.
We were coming in to land, and according to our calculations, everything was fine, but we hit an updraft. We crash-landed on the mountain. Luckily it was the rainy season and the ground had softened. The helicopter just hovered and then slid down. Fortunately, everyone survived. I was sitting there thinking: well, I came here to earn some money."
His Africa posting not only helped Yevhen to grow professionally, it also broadened his horizons.
"When I left, I thought we were the most educated country. I arrive in the Congo, and what do I see? The whole world can communicate freely. A soldier from Indonesia, not even an officer, can speak English fluently. And my level of English at the time was 'London is the capital of Great Britain' and 'I get up at 7 o'clock'.
Later in Liberia, and when I went back to the Congo again, I was conducting radio exchanges entirely by myself."
And then war came to his country.
Yevhen returned to Ukraine in May 2014, passed the medical board examination, and a week later, his first rotation to the Anti-Terrorist Operation zone began.
At that time they were sending up anything that could fly, regardless of its serviceability. All the helicopters that existed had been repaired, but there was a critical shortage of crews.
"There was almost never a clear front line in the combat zone. Our people are here, theirs are there… no one could really say that. I was on a Mi-8, carrying out non-combat tasks – dropping off a group, waiting for wounded soldiers, picking up cargo, dropping it off.
When we transported the dead, we'd be asked how many we could take. We'd say, 'We can take 20 people.' They'd bring you this box and say, 'There are six here. How many more boxes like this can you take?' And you realised you had to count boxes, not people.
It was tough. We tore up wormwood and laid it under the seats to do something about the smell of corpses, because it wasn't always possible to clean the helicopter properly when it was constantly in use."
Yevhen recalls a moment that took place in July 2014, when Ukrainian forces liberated Kramatorsk from the DPR ("Donetsk People's Republic") separatists and Russian servicemen who "happened to be there on holiday".
"We flew there, dropped off a group, and parked the helicopters. There were separatists [Russian troops] around in the town. We hid in dugouts, lying there, resting. And a classmate of mine, one of the best Mi-24 pilots, says: 'My mum said: "Join the military and you'll get paid to do nothing and twiddle your thumbs." But this is nothing like what Mum said.'"
Before the full-scale invasion, Yevhen was the deputy commander of a helicopter squadron in Chornobaivka, working on flight preparations.
Today, he admits he was wrong to think that if a full-scale invasion started, army aviation would operate the way it did in 2014: the Mi-24s would carry out strike tasks, while the Mi-8s would transport cargo and wounded soldiers.
Everything the textbooks said about modern warfare was turned upside down on 24 February 2022.
Kherson. Evacuation and the first Russian convoys
In the early days of the full-scale war, part of Yevhen's brigade, the 11th Separate Army Aviation Brigade, took part in the defence of Kyiv. Another part stayed in the south, where the Russians were advancing towards Kherson from Crimea. The first thing Yevhen had to do was get the equipment and people at the Chornobaivka airfield out of danger.
"The worst thing for me was the thought of being left without a helicopter. I don't make a good infantryman with a rifle, to be honest. I feel a lot more comfortable with a helicopter."
His helicopter had been dismantled, and the engineers estimated that it would take three days to get it ready.
"I turn up and I see the depot exploding, and the engineers are swarming over that helicopter like ants – they just gather round and set to work. Everything around them is on fire, but they get on with it. And it took them two or three hours to put it together, not three days!"
As well as his work at the airfield, Yevhen had to think about evacuating his family. His wife and children went to Kropyvnytskyi in central Ukraine, while his mother remained in Kherson during the occupation.
Many now recall how, at the very start of the invasion, the Russians proclaimed from the rooftops that Ukrainian aviation had been completely destroyed. But that talk didn't reach the pilots themselves. There was no time for that. They had to use their supposedly destroyed helicopters to stop the Russian convoys.
Yevhen remembers his first encounter with Russian military hardware.
"I look over, and there's a convoy coming, and they see these helicopters flying at them from the direction of Crimea. And they just sat there and watched. All they could do was wave. Maybe some of them did wave – we were coming in from the rear. It's great now that you can understand that, but at the time, it was pure adrenaline."
Carrying out fire missions on the Mi-8 "workhorse" was a daunting task for the Ukrainian pilots. Yevhen and his colleagues did have that kind of experience, but on a training ground, in comfortable conditions at a comfortable altitude, during twice-yearly demonstration exercises – not in a combat zone.
"That meant we had to stay close to each other, fire, and see what we hit. Not the way you would in combat, but so it would look nice."
In combat conditions, firing from level flight had led to losses of equipment and personnel. So the crews began working with a pitch-up – a manoeuvre that involves gaining height by raising the aircraft's nose.
"When we started using various pitch-up techniques from the altitudes we fly at and in the conditions we fly in, we discovered that what the manuals say about aimed fire doesn't correspond to reality. We looked for ways to solve this problem. And then we adapted."
Azovstal and Snake Island
Yevhen's helicopter has been seriously damaged on two occasions since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. One of the missions was a flight to the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works, which was blockaded by the Russians in besieged Mariupol.
The pilots tasked with that mission understood that it could be a one-way trip. They had to fly more than 100 km over occupied territory carrying a landing force and ammunition, then return with wounded soldiers – all without being shot down.
The route was planned by specialists from Defence Intelligence of Ukraine to avoid enemy air defence systems and firing positions.
"Every evening we received updated information about the enemy's air defences along the route. I remembered that there was a Tor just here yesterday," Yevhen says, referring to the Russian surface-to-air missile system. "They said: 'We must have forgotten to mark it on the map, you'll have to skirt around it.' And you realised that the way the map was drawn, you'd have flown straight into it."
By the pilot's own estimate, the chances of not returning from the mission were 80%.
"Before the flight I wrote a text to my wife, but then I thought: what if, God forbid, she's awake now and reads all that – what's the point? Then I wrote a text to a friend asking him to pass it on to my wife. But then I thought: no, I've already said too much."
On 31 March 2022, on their second attempt (the first was in early March), Yevhen's crew finally reached Azovstal.
"While we were loading, dawn was breaking, the sun was rising, and it seemed as if everything was getting brighter. There was such euphoria that I'd actually managed to get there."
After unloading the cargo and dropping off the fighters who had volunteered to help those who were besieged in the plant, they had to decide how many of the wounded the helicopter could carry on the return journey.
"I said we'd take as many as we could fit in the helicopter. I thought: we'll pick up the guys, somehow manage to take off, and everything will be fine."
Yevhen and his crew saved 20 people that day. But the mission was not without losses.
On the way back, the Russians had set up an ambush and the group came under anti-aircraft and missile fire. A missile hit Yevhen's helicopter, but by some miracle it failed to detonate. Flying on a single working engine and under heavy fire, the Mi-8 somehow made it back to the take-off point.
Tragically, one of the helicopters flying behind Yevhen was shot down. Only two of the passengers survived; the entire crew and the other wounded soldiers on board were killed.
Less than a week after the Mariupol flight, Yevhen was assigned an even more difficult mission – to take part in the operation to liberate Zmiinyi (Snake) Island.
The challenge lay in the fact that this tiny patch of land is completely surrounded by sea, meaning there were no trees, hills or other natural features to hide behind. Enemy aircraft constantly patrolled over Zmiinyi Island, and the Russians had deployed surface-to-air missile systems there that were capable of striking the helicopters long before the pilots could open fire.
According to the plan, the mission could be aborted at any stage if the enemy's air defence systems were not jammed, if there was no fire support, or if Russian fighter jets appeared.
"With proper planning you understand that at each stage, if the others have done their job, then you'll do yours. If something hasn't been done, the mission has to be called off. But things went a bit differently for us."
Yevhen said everyone knew that the old Ukrainian Su-27s would not be able to withstand the Russian Su-35s, so the fighter pilots were to warn army aviation if Russian fighter jets appeared.
"We'd all trained together, so we coordinated informally, directly between crews. We asked: 'What tasks have you been given?'
'Diversion and distracting attention.'
'If anything happens, will you engage in air-to-air combat?'
They said: 'How would I engage in air-to-air combat?'
'What would you do?'
'I'd disengage.'
'Fine. If you're going to disengage, warn us that you're disengaging.'
The first time we tried it, they disengaged and warned us. The second time they were told 'Don't warn anyone any more…' And that's more or less how it worked."
On weapons of victory and the new generation of soldiers
When people talk about transitioning to modern types of weaponry, they usually mean drones, tanks and aircraft. There's a lot less talk about army aviation, even though Ukrainian pilots continue to fly old Soviet-era machines.
Yevhen believes it is essential to switch to helicopters that can use Western weapons. However, he doesn't think Ukraine should chase after hyped-up models such as the US-made Apache, because no single piece of equipment can serve as a universal "weapon of victory" – its effectiveness depends on being part of a fully developed military ecosystem.
"The Apache is top of the range – the most expensive toy, the most sophisticated helicopter in the world. It's like a Bugatti Veyron: classy and costly. But it has to be used as part of a system."
Yevhen is cautious when he speaks about the new generation of soldiers shaped by the Russo-Ukrainian war, as not all Soviet-style thinking has been rooted out of the army.
"As they say, there aren't many fools in the army, but they're very cleverly positioned. Those who graduated during the Russo-Ukrainian war are learning from their commanders. And there are some commanders who appoint people not because of their professional skills, but because they're convenient. So it's hard to say that this new generation is a decisive one. Still, there are some green shoots – strong stalks pushing their way up through the asphalt."
***
Yevhen comes from a military family, so to finish, we had to ask how he would react if one of his children wanted to sit at the controls of a combat helicopter.
"It doesn't matter what they choose as long as they're happy and can earn a living, God willing. Our task is to make sure that they could go into the military, but in a country that's at peace."
Even Yevhen's private dream of a peaceful future has a connection with the sky.
"Have you seen those videos on social media of people flying a Robinson [a small civilian helicopter – ed.] to the supermarket? I'd like one parked outside my house that I could fly. I want beautiful flights where you don't have to think about the fact that someone's about to kill you, that you have a mission to complete, or that the drone you're chasing needs to land in a field and not a populated area.
I want to build a house; I want children, a dog, and a little chopper that I can fly and enjoy."
Authors: Mykhailo Kryhel, Yevhen Buderatskyi – Ukrainska Pravda
Translation: Anastasiia Yankina, Yelyzaveta Khodatska and Anna Kybukevych
Editing: Teresa Pearce