The story of a Ukrainian infantryman who signed up in 2015 and is still serving
When Kostiantyn Chykachkov received his call-up papers in the summer of 2015, he started dancing.
"It was a drizzly day, something was falling from the sky," he recalls. "I looked out of the window and saw Auntie Zhenia from the village council coming up. Her eyes were wide: 'What's wrong with you, Kostia? Why are you dancing?'"
"Because I'd been waiting for this moment for so long," replied the future sergeant of the Vovkodavy (Wolfhounds) Battalion of the 57th Brigade. The woman was stunned. "I brought call-up papers to four people today," she told him, "and all of them told me to f**k off."
The 36-year-old soldier, alias Chykist, has fought in Luhansk and Kherson oblasts, in Bakhmut, on the Kupiansk front and in Vovchansk. He had wanted to be a soldier since childhood.
"When I was first summoned to the enlistment office – that was in 2006, when I was in the ninth grade at school [14-15 years old] – they asked me where I saw myself in the army," he says. "I don't know why – maybe my gut told me – but I answered very clearly: I want to join the infantry."
"They wouldn't take me as a volunteer at the start of the Anti-Terrorist Operation [combat actions in parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts against Russian military forces and pro-Russian separatists]," Kostiantyn says. "By then I already had three children, although my wife and I weren't officially married at the time. I wanted to sort it out properly at the enlistment office, but they said: Kostia, your family record will still show the children. Go home." [Fathers of three or more children were exempt from mobilisation and were only allowed to sign up for service in their own region.]
He had to wait almost a year.
"I got the call-up papers," Kostiantyn continues. "I went to the military medical commission. They gave me a checklist, and I went into every room with it and said straight away: don't examine me, just take my word for it – I'm healthy. Just stamp it: fit, fit and fit."
In an interview with Ukrainska Pravda, Kostiantyn talks about the fiercest battles against assault troops from Russia's Wagner private military company and the so-called Storm Z, penal units of the Russian military, clashes at the Aggregate Plant in Vovchansk and the mystical Black Forest near Synkivka.
What follows is his experience of the full-scale war in his own words.