Soldiers wrapped in blankets and sleeping bags, some arms and legs missing, were hoisted into the helicopters, whose rotors kept spinning. They took off with eight or nine fighters injured that day, Flint said, some of whom were aware enough to show cellphone videos of the intense fighting they had endured.
The March 21 mission, captured on video provided by Flint, lasted just 20 minutes on the ground. “There was just this feeling of happiness, of emotional satisfaction that we were able to get these guys out,” Flint said.
In total, Operation Air Corridor, as the participants called it, managed to land helicopters in Azovstal seven times over the next two weeks and rescue 85 seriously injured soldiers, Flint said. A heavily sedated Sergeant Tsymbal was among those evacuated.
But the helicopters also brought in other soldiers, mostly volunteers, including Pvt. Nikita Zherdev of the Azov Regiment. Her father had died in the bombing of Mariupol weeks earlier, and he wrote to her sister before leaving to tell her to learn to take care of herself. He didn’t tell her what he thought: that he didn’t expect to come out alive.
“As soon as we landed in Azovstal, I realized that, wow, there’s really stuff going on here,” he said. “Everything was covered in smoke. Everything was under fire. The people who greeted us shouted: “Faster, faster, faster – there are airstrikes every five minutes, planes are coming.”
Originally from Mariupol, Private Zherdev already knew the troops of Azovstal, but the men he found were withered ghosts of those soldiers, starving and exhausted and covered in blood and gun oil after weeks of relentless fighting. . They were shocked to see him.