National Guard Soldier Fights Through 5-Day Ordeal with Slit Throat to Reach Safety

In the Pokrovsk sector, a Ukrainian soldier survived torture in Russian captivity and made it back to Ukrainian positions.

National Guard soldier Vladyslav crawled for five days with a slit throat to reach his own. Suspilne published the soldier’s story.

The serviceman is currently in a hospital in the Dnipropetrovsk region – he has already undergone surgery.

“First, he was caught, and then taken to a basement. There were completely different soldiers there. There were two of them, and they were the ones who tortured the prisoners,” Vladyslav’s wife shares.

The 33-year-old National Guard soldier is currently unable to speak – he wrote everything that happened to him in a diary.

His throat was slit, and he was left to die in a pit along with other prisoners. However, Vladyslav managed to survive.

A few weeks ago, his brigade lost control of a position near Pokrovsk. During an attempt to help his comrades, Vladyslav was captured.

“He said that the first Ukrainian soldiers from reconnaissance who fell into Russian hands were tortured particularly brutally – their eyes were gouged out, their lips, ears, and noses were cut off, and their bodies were mutilated,” Vladyslav’s brother Yevhen told.

According to the Ukrainian soldier, he was the last of eight fighters whom the Russian invaders threw into a pit. They decided that everyone was dead.

When the Russians left, Vladyslav tied his throat with a cloth and crawled for almost five days to reach Ukrainian positions.

“He was lucky that when they were thrown into the pit, garbage was also dumped on top. There was a broken bottle there. His hands were tied, and he managed to cut the rope with that bottle,” his sister, Viktoriya, shares.

On August 17, he was admitted to a hospital in the Dnipropetrovsk region in critical condition.

“When someone’s throat is cut and they’re bleeding out, there’s almost no chance of survival. But he hung on until the end and believed that everything would be okay,” the doctors say.

In 11 years of war, this is the first case of its kind at this medical facility.

Despite all he has endured, Vladyslav is already thinking about returning to the front line after his treatment and recovery, his brother says.

“He writes that he wants those monsters to feel the same pain that he and our seven fellow Cossack soldiers went through,” Yevhen adds.

Last year, a remarkable case was also recorded when a Ukrainian drone operator managed to guide a captured Ukrainian Defense Forces soldier to safety from Russian captivity.