He faced Russia’s brutality for years. But like Ukraine, Serhii persevered — at a price

It all began on Feb. 24, 2022 — the day Serhii’s daughter Margarita turned one year old in Ukraine’s beautiful seaside city of Mariupol. There had been plans for cake and toys. Instead, Russia’s full-scale invasion ignited one of the deadliest battles of the war with the city suffering tens of thousands of deaths and 90 per cent of its residential buildings destroyed or damaged.

That evening, Serhii led his wife Tatiana and their three children into a cramped basement where they slept on the concrete floor as explosions blasted overhead.

At dawn, he rose before they stirred. He packed his medical bag with what supplies he could, climbed out of the shelter and walked toward the danger. If he could no longer heal Mariupol’s children in his clinic, he would try to defend their future.

“When your city is being bombed, and someone is suffering,” Serhii told me much later, “there is no time to think of anything else.”

The bag felt heavier than usual as he left his sleeping family. Only weeks later would he realize that silence can be the cruelest goodbye.

Over three years into the war, Serhii’s story is the story of Ukraine itself: innocence; suffering; yet unwilling to surrender.

Serhii is a small, serious man. His gentle manner made him a natural pediatrician but an unlikely soldier. As waves of wounded people overwhelmed the few doctors who remained, the 40-year-old was appointed head physician of Mariupol’s territorial defence force.

“Who are you anyway?” asked a tall, bearded medic in his charge named Volodymyr Galkin.

Serhii looked up. “I’m a pediatrician.”

Volodymyr let out a short laugh. “A doctor for children? In a war?”

The 107th Battalion was an improvised group of local reservists and volunteers with almost nothing to fight with. No technology, no tanks, no supplies. All they could offer were a few uniforms and heavy Soviet-style AK-47 rifles they issued to anyone who showed up to lend a hand. But they headed to battle determined.

Serhii, known to his colleagues simply as Doc, led rescue squads through bombardments that levelled homes, schools and hospitals. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians were killed within weeks, contributing to the war that has now seen an estimated 1.4 million casualties.

Each strike brought new victims. With scant supplies and little training, his teams pulled survivors from basements, stitched torn flesh and splinted bones. They rarely had time to cradle the dying as Mariupol collapsed around them. Overhead, fighter jets screamed just above the rooftops, driving people to the ground. Some in apartments could not bear it and leapt from their balconies.

By March 2022, a few weeks into the Russian invasion, the city was an island surrounded by the enemy. The attacker had extinguished Mariupol’s power, cell towers and water and taken about a fifth of Ukraine’s territory, a proportion slightly larger than it occupies today. During those early weeks, Doc scarcely had time to rest. In many ways he was fighting for his family, but he had no way to reach them. Were they safe? Were they even alive? Did they think he was already dead?

One day that month, as Doc pulled survivors from the ruins of a four-storey building, everything became too much. On the shattered stairs sat a mother, holding what was left of her daughter — a body so mangled it was impossible for him to guess her age. Maybe a teenager. Now he noticed her other half buried in rubble.

Doc’s chest seized. The woman made no sound. He longed to kneel beside her, to offer a word, a gesture, some fragment of dignity.

But he couldn’t. The air reeked of smoke and blood. Exhaustion shook his body. He felt himself breaking.

In that moment, the man who had refused to leave Mariupol knew his hope had collapsed.

But then came nearby shouts — urgent, panicked, unmistakably alive. Doc recalls clenching his fists and turning back to the living. The people of Mariupol still breathed, and as long as they did, so would he.

“I didn’t see any chance of surviving in the hell around me,” he later told me, “But people needed my help.”

He gathered his strength and dived back into the war.

The collapse of Mariupol’s last hospital would drive Doc into an even darker chapter.

The battalion retreated to the Illich Steel and Iron Works, a fortress-like complex where thousands of soldiers and civilians clung to survival.

Soon the plant itself came under attack. For weeks the soldiers in the steel plant resisted. But by mid-April Russian forces closed in, and they were ordered to surrender.

“They undressed us right away,” Doc said of that moment. Machine-guns levelled, enemy troops seized their food, their money, everything in their pockets. “They left us nothing.”

Russians crammed them like cargo into windowless trucks, he said, and transported them to a prison called Olenivka in a region of eastern Ukraine that Russia had occupied since 2014. Brutality awaited them.

“We were forced to run through two lines of more than 20 guards hitting us with belts and batons,” Doc said. “The beating was merciless.”

That violent arrival was, he said, just the beginning of the Russians’ cruelty. He said the prisoners were forced to squat in painful positions for hours or be beaten again. He recounted a story of guards smashing his head against a wall until he lost consciousness. It is from testimonies from survivors like Doc that has led Human Rights Watch and other international organizations to call for a War Crimes Inquiry into the actions of Russian forces in Mariupol, Olenivka and other occupied regions.

Although the beatings were vicious at Olenivka, starvation was an even greater torment. During that first month, Doc said he received half a cup of water a day and food so scant it barely kept him alive. Even then, he could not bear to stop trying to treat the wounded. Amid the daily horror, he recalled cobbling together a medical bag from items he found in the garbage — rags, discarded medicines, anything that might help. Then he forced his fragile body to treat those who were in even worse shape.

Olenivka’s patients were shattered. Doc saw people suffering with splintered limbs, concussions, heart attacks. Many bled from kidneys battered by beatings. There were men torn open by sexual assault, he said. Lice crawled through heads and armpits, infections festered in untreated cuts. And everywhere he saw bodies that sagged from hunger and torture.

In Olenivka, as in Mariupol, Doc’s friend Volodymyr watched him weigh every medical decision. Doc wasn’t talkative, Volodymyr said much later, but his psychology training, honed by years of soothing frightened children, helped him steady broken adults.

As Doc fought to save lives, Ukraine fought on, too. By July, the country that the world thought would collapse in three days was still standing — pushing Russia back from the Black Sea, reclaiming towns west of Kyiv and defying what was thought to be the world’s second-greatest military.

Yet at Olenivka, Russia was preparing another kind of assault: an explosion at the prison that independent investigations would later say was a cover for torture and execution.

One day Doc noticed about 200 prisoners being transferred to a new warehouse-style barracks set a short distance from where inmates were usually housed. The prisoners were mostly soldiers from Azov — a regiment that President Vladimir Putin vilified as fascists bent on destroying Russia.

That night Doc woke to the thunder of explosions ripping through the dark. Voices rose in panic, some screaming his name. Soon the air was heavy with smoke. The new barracks was in flames. As he snatched up his meagre kit — rags, a tourniquet, vials of saline — he recalled seeing Russian guards dressed, unusually, in battle armour and helmets, dragging themselves through the mud in search of cover. This was no accident, he felt.

Doc and fellow prisoners worked with whatever they could find to tend to the wounded captives. Bedsheets became bandages and a few precious bottles of water became the only medicine for searing burns. He later told me that five men died in his arms. Many more lay scattered across the ground, beyond his reach. 

Later investigations of the massacre, which Russia blamed on a Ukrainian strike, found that more than 50 prisoners were killed and over 100 wounded. Independent analyses point to a different conclusion: that Russian forces shelled their own camp.

By the morning after the strike, Doc said he had fought to save dozens, knowing most would not survive. Another moment of despair washed over him. In the middle of this catastrophe, his thoughts drifted to Tatiana and his children. He hoped they had fled Mariupol and survived. But if they were alive, they probably thought he was dead. Hopelessness overtook him again, as it had that day in Mariupol. Once again, he could feel despair stripping away his will to move, to fight, to go on.

Then, near the rescue site, he noticed a wild cherry tree, heavy with ripe fruit. The men who could still walk picked berries, sharing them with those too weak to move. One tall prisoner bent the tree toward him and said, “Pick them yourself.” Doc showed his blood-caked hands. So, the man broke off a branch, holding it steady while Doc ate five, maybe even 10 cherries right off the branch.

He would later look back at that moment as when he recovered his will to go on. He was stirred not by the sweet taste but by the prisoner’s act of kindness. Even in a place full of flames and death, men still found ways to feed one another.

This told him again that he could not stop. Others still needed him, and as long as they did, he would endure.

A few months later Doc was transferred to Stary Oskol prison in Russia’s Belgorod region and after that to a penal colony in Mordovia, deep in Russia’s interior. Now 1,600 kilometres from Ukraine, he worried his family would have no chance of finding him. Each day at Mordovia was a struggle just to stay alive.

“It was the worst place in the world that I could ever dream of,” Doc recalled, his eyes cast downward.

Allegations of abuse at Mordovia bore grim similarities to accounts of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during the Second World War. Guards wearing balaclavas used stun guns, truncheons, electric shocks and vicious dogs to attack starving prisoners at random, according to an investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

Doc said he and his cellmates were forced to stand on a yellow line in their tiny damp cell for 16 hours a day. Often, they had to sing the Russian anthem. If the guards noticed them moving or showing weakness, they were taken to the corridor and beaten.

Standing for many hours can cause trophic ulcers and abscesses, terrible wounds that may not heal for a long time. One tall young man in Doc’s cell had gangrenous edemas that ballooned in his legs and blackened the skin, he recalled. Another man, named Evgeny, had a festering leg that he could not straighten. Every morning Doc said he would bandage it in fresh rags and then support Evgeny as he balanced on his good leg while cameras tracked their every move.

“If they saw Evgeny leaning over on the camera, they would beat all of us,” he said, his voice flat at the memory.

Tortured and exhausted from standing, Doc still spent nights tending the wounded. Another of his cellmates had epilepsy and often seized in the dark, hitting his head on the floor. Doc kept him safe until the tremors passed. There were moments Doc was certain he would never survive. At his lowest ebb, only thoughts of how to help others kept him from breaking.

“If I stopped helping, it would be like walking into a bog. I would be dragged down, down to the bottom.”

On the first day we met after his release, in February 2025, Serhii spoke to me from his shared room in a military hospital on the outskirts of Kyiv. For a moment or two, the war seemed far away as the forests of central Ukraine blossomed outside his window.

Against all the odds, after 1,030 days apart, Serhii was reunited with his family in Ukraine. Through the long, dark years, they had refused to give up hope. Tatiana and the children went to rallies in support of prisoners, appealed to international organizations and questioned former captives seeking the faintest proof of Doc’s survival.

But as I listened to Serhii, he suddenly went quiet. He had been recounting a tough memory from his captivity, and he stopped short. A moment later, his body slumped backward onto his hospital bed — whether from exhaustion, trauma or something deeper, I couldn’t tell. I spent 10 minutes trying to comfort him, but he no longer knew I was there.

It was a week before we spoke again.

Serhii’s survival is a quiet kind of victory. The same kind I see on the streets of Kyiv, still pulsing with life after years of fire, terror and grief. Serhii’s resilience is Ukraine’s resilience, a country battered by war but continuing the fight, a nation unwilling to bow. Not ready to surrender.

Fighting in Ukraine remains fierce along a 1,200-km front as Russia pounds infrastructure and civilian areas. Speaking to international leaders at the Yalta European Strategy meeting in Kyiv last month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy demanded tougher global action against Russia, warning that anything less will prolong the war indefinitely.

“Russia’s war machine will only stop when it runs out of fuel,” he said. “Dialogue alone will not achieve this.”

Months after his release, Serhii’s body carries wounds that refuse to heal. His left hand and foot remain numb. His spine and knees are fractured. Shrapnel remains buried in his head, where the pain of concussions flares like aftershocks.

His greatest injury is invisible. He reckons with post-traumatic stress few could imagine: nightmares; flashbacks; angry outbursts. He panics at sudden sounds, struggles to sleep and cannot concentrate for more than a few minutes.

“I cannot return to a normal life,” he said in a recent interview in his hospital room.

“I love my wife and children, but I am no longer the man I used to be.”

As the light faded over the trees outside, Serhii seemed resigned to a life as a patient, too sick to return to his family. Too broken to be a husband and father.

“I will never work as a doctor again.”

But then a message arrived. The veteran’s clinic needed a doctor to train therapists treating traumatized soldiers.