2014-15 Battle of Donetsk Airport: the War That Continues to This Day

Commonly referred to as “cyborgs,” they were just men who became warriors

Eleven years ago, the last defenders of Donetsk Airport forever inscribed, with their own blood, the tragic lines of the epilogue to Ukraine’s modern national epic — the heroic legend of the “cyborgs.”

This story is about them.

On the latest anniversary marking the defense of the Donetsk airfield, Ukrinform spoke with those who, in the final days of the battle for DAP, were destined to hold out, to survive, and to buy precious time for the next generation of Ukrainian soldiers to prepare for February 24, 2022.

TO PREVENT ADDITIONAL LOSS OF LIFE

Their rotation into Donetsk Airport began on December 30, 2014 — one day before New Year’s Eve. To reach DAP from the village of Vodiane, the second element of the 8th Company of the 3rd Battalion, 80th Separate Airmobile Brigade, had to pass through an enemy checkpoint under so-called “control.”

It was a humiliating procedure that Ukrainian command agreed to in order to avoid unnecessary casualties during the so-called “New Year’s ceasefire.”

The separatists had set up the checkpoint on a bridge along the highway from Avdiivka to Spartak. On either side of the highway stood an entrenched enemy APC, sniper positions, and machine-gun nests. The convoy of Ukrainian trucks was fully exposed — in plain sight, under direct aim, like targets on a firing range. At a command to halt, the “opolchentsy” brazenly approached the vehicles carrying the paratroopers, beginning their inspection to verify compliance with the “agreements.”

“This is probably hard to explain to the guys who are on the front line now. But that was our war,” recalls Andrii Lisnichuk, call sign “Lisnyk,” who at the time was an airmobile platoon commander and among those heading into the new terminal to replace their comrades. “We had to grit our teeth, suppress our anger, and carry out the order: rotate without bloodshed — without breaking through to the airport under fire and without provoking the militants.”

Soldiers from t he 8th Company of the 3rd Battalion, 80th Separate Airmobile Brigade, before rotating into the airport

Under the agreement reached with the DPR militants, each paratrooper was allowed to carry no more ammunition than three magazines for personal weapons, with only one of them permitted to be loaded.

The remaining ammunition, so they would still have something to fight with later, was hidden during transit in stacks of firewood and inside the spare tires of the trucks that drove them into the airport. Once inside the terminal, the soldiers dismantled those wheels, providing the garrison with an additional supply of ammunition.

“The separatist fighters confiscated everything they could find that was deemed ‘prohibited’ — even under-barrel grenade launchers,” recalls the former paratrooper commander. “They searched our personal belongings, rummaged through our backpacks and bags. Somehow, in an argument with one of ‘theirs,’ I managed to keep my thermal imager — at the time an expensive and scarce piece of equipment. Psychologically, it was extremely hard.”

Andrii says that seeing the satisfied faces of the separatists and the Russians was revolting. What kept him from snapping — from lashing out and beating them — was the knowledge that at the airport comrades were waiting: those to be relieved and evacuated back to the “mainland,” the wounded, the living — and those returning home “on their shields.”

A NEW YEAR AT “POSITIVE”

In the new terminal of Donetsk Airport, which the unit finally reached, Lisnyk was assigned to a position known as “Positive,” located on the second level of an already half-destroyed structure.

Militants controlled most of the level, leaving “Positive” as the last Ukrainian-held position that prevented separatist forces from launching a sudden attack on the new terminal’s defenders from above.

The position’s windows looked out over the western part of the airfield, a cemetery, a monastery, and the control tower. Many remember the spot for what it had been in peacetime: a luxury car dealership. When fighting broke out at the airport in May 2014, the owners never dared to evacuate a sleek Porsche Cayenne that stood on display.

The vehicle remained in the very epicenter of the fierce battles and became a kind of grim local landmark. When Lisnyk saw it for the first time, only charred metal remains reminded anyone of what had once been a prestigious vehicle.

2015 New Year’s greeting from ‘Lisnyk’

The car showroom was a critical sector in the terminal’s defense, as it—and the elevator shaft—provided a potential route for the separatists to slip down to the first floor, closer to the defenders’ main positions.

“I don’t really remember how New Year’s night passed,” Andrii recalls with irony. “Somehow it never registered which night was actually New Year’s. We didn’t hear the President’s address, and there were no chimes from ‘their side’ either. The guys who do remember that night say there wasn’t much shooting. We just exchanged a few bursts of ‘firework salutes’ with the enemy…”

The rotation’s first casualties came on the very first day of the new year. Grenade launcher operator Liubomyr Podfedko was killed by an enemy VOG grenade round, and several of his comrades were wounded.

Andrii’s memories of the two-week rotation are fragmentary. What stands out most is the brutal cold—temperatures dropping below minus 30 degrees Celsius—followed by a sudden thaw and dampness that cut straight to the bone, penetrating every cell of the body. He also remembers the brief hours of daylight and the swift, heavy winter twilight, the darkness and nighttime silence you listened to even while half-asleep, reacting to every faint sound.

Later, Andrii moved from the “Positive” position down one level, to the command-and-observation post below.

A bar at the new terminal: tea, coffee, cappuccino…

What remains before his eyes to this day is a kaleidoscope of enemy assaults—firefights at distances measured in barely a dozen steps; point-blank shelling from Grad rocket systems, heavy artillery, and tanks. A frozen concrete floor strewn with shards of shattered glass and drywall, chunks of collapsed walls, spent shell casings, twisted metal framing, and empty zinc ammunition crates. And the absence of the taste of ordinary drinking water—water that froze solid, was melted down, and then consumed boiled, like tea or coffee.

All of this etched in his mind without dates or time markers, as a single, uninterrupted narrative—without paragraph breaks—like the plot of an endless, surreal play.

Sergeant Major Vitalii Hnatenko. Vodyane, November 2014

ARMOR, “BIZON,” AND THE DRIVERS

On January 14, several MT-LB armored vehicles from the battalion arrived to extract the first group of their rotation. There were not enough seats for everyone, so the wounded and those who had already spent more than two weeks at the airport were evacuated first—back to what the soldiers called “the mainland.” Andrii, along with twelve other paratroopers from his company, remained at their positions together with the reinforcements, waiting their turn to be evacuated.

Lieutenant Lisnichuk’s ticket for the flight home. The “departure” was delayed by two days…

“We watched the armor disappear down what we called the ‘death road,’ heading back toward Vodiane under relentless fire,” Andrii recalls. “As they were moving out, the enemy was pounding the runway nonstop with Grad rockets. The fact that the guys managed to make it through those few kilometers and survive was nothing short of a miracle.”

January 14, Pisky. Those who returned that day from the new terminal

In reality, it was not a miracle that saved them, but the courage and skill of the MTLB drivers.

These lightly armored tracked vehicles came to the battalion almost as an afterthought—non-standard equipment added on the side. Formed in July 2014 on the basis of the 80th Separate Airmobile Brigade, the 3rd Battalion was manned one hundred percent with mobilized personnel. The unit had been issued far from the best equipment: 37 aging BTR-70 armored personnel carriers. Against that backdrop, the nimble, maneuverable MTLBs proved to be a true stroke of luck.

More precisely, they were the result of the initiative and persistence of “Bizon”—Warrant Officer Vitalii Hnatenko, the battalion’s logistics platoon commander. It was he who managed to “find” these vehicles and reach an agreement with volunteers from the town of Slavuta, who helped bring them back to life through painstaking repairs.

Vitalii Hnatenko, 2026

“The main body of our battalion was undergoing training at the Yavoriv training ground until early November,” Vitalii recalls. “But as early as September, our logistics and supply unit was the first to head east, to Kostiantynivka, in order to determine the battalion’s future deployment site and prepare everything necessary to accommodate the personnel at a new permanent base.”

“Ares” and “Bizon.” Eleven years after the Donetsk Airport defense operation

An abandoned school building was allocated to quarter the Lviv paratroopers—a structure without windows or doors, without electricity or heating, utterly unfit for habitation. Within a month, the soldiers restored the electrical wiring with their own hands, installed plumbing and sewage, repaired the windows. More than that, they built a bathhouse with showers and hooked up washing machines.

Earlier still, in July, “Bizon” had received orders to ferry those same lightly armored tracked vehicles from one of the long-term storage bases. The machines had sat in conservation for several decades. On paper, according to official documentation, they had undergone routine maintenance and were supposedly ready for service. In reality, they were in appalling condition. At first, a repair team led by Hnatenko tried to bring the vehicles back to life on their own. But after spending all their personal money on WD-40 just to scrape off rust and pry open the hatches, they quickly realized that restoring the equipment without outside help was impossible.

That was when someone from the local community advised the sergeant to contact volunteers from a nearby district center—people who had already been helping the military repair equipment taken out of long-term storage.

“Bizon” and his motolyha (“motolyha” is soldiers’ slang for the MT-LB multi-purpose tracked armored vehicle)

As a result, the battalion acquired eight non-standard combat vehicles—solidly refurbished and, in practice, priceless as makeshift “taxis” to the airport.

From November through the final days of the airport’s defense, every run these tracked all-terrain vehicles made from Vodiane to the airport and back was an act of genuine heroism. They carried reinforcements into the DAP, delivered food and ammunition, and evacuated the wounded and the bodies of the fallen.

“Dmytro Huzyk, Anatolii Markus, and our other drivers were true heroes,” Vitalii Hnatenko recalls. “The last weeks of fighting for the airport were especially brutal. The men were collapsing from sheer exhaustion—physical and psychological—chronic lack of sleep, and overwhelming fatigue.”

DMYTRO HUZYK’S LAST RUN

On the night of January 18, the last successful run was made to what remained of the new terminal. Dmytro Huzyk volunteered to drive to the airport to evacuate the wounded.

Crates of ammunition and food were loaded onto the roof of the MT-LB so they could be unloaded quickly, leaving more space in the troop compartment for those rotating out. To prevent the ammunition from detonating under fire, the cargo was covered with sandbags. As it later became clear, this likely saved their lives: not a single sandbag survived the journey. Six times, enemy Grad rockets exploded so close that the vehicle was thrown into the air, seeming on the verge of overturning. But they made it through.

On that final run from the terminal, Huzyk managed to evacuate sixteen wounded defenders of the Donetsk airport.

“Lisnyk,” “Psykh,” and “Kipish”

“Ihor ‘Psykh’ Zinych, a medic with the 80th Brigade’s 3rd Battalion, was supposed to leave with those men,” recalls Yevhen Kovtun, who at the time served as an artillery spotter with the 93rd Separate Mechanized Brigade and was among the defenders of the ‘Positive’ position. “‘Psykh’ was an extraordinary person. At least fifty people owed their lives to him— people he quite literally pulled back from ‘the other side.’ But he himself stayed behind in the terminal. He was killed when an explosion caused a wall to collapse. Posthumously, Junior Sergeant Ihor Viktorovych Zinych of the medical service was awarded the title Hero of Ukraine.”

The following day, January 19, Dmytro Huzyk was killed. During another breakout attempt, his vehicle—loaded with ammunition—was struck by several RPG rounds at once. The MT-LB exploded before the eyes of those he was driving to save, barely fifty meters from the radar station position.

Shown here in the front row, on the right is Yevhen Kovtun with his brothers-in-arms

WE WILL STAY HERE UNTIL THE END

Yevhen Kovtun himself arrived at Donetsk Airport as part of one of the final rotations, on January 6, 2015. Like Lisnichuk, he entered the airport quietly, passing through a separatist checkpoint.

Inside the terminal, he reported his arrival to the commandant, callsign “Ares.” He could not make out the officer’s face: Ares had already been at the airport for several weeks, and in the darkness his bearded, soot-blackened face streaked with gray blended into the overall black-and-ash palette of the burned-out interior.

Captain Oleksandr “Ares” Skyba

Flashlights were, of course, never switched on to look at one another, nor were mobile phones——any glimmer of light would instantly draw enemy sniper fire. To avoid giving themselves away even by sound, the men regularly cleared the floors of the sections of the terminal under their control, whenever visibility allowed, removing debris, spent shell casings, and anything else that could crunch underfoot at night and betray their position with telltale noise. To navigate the darkness without getting lost, the cyborgs marked the routes to their positions with small fishing glow sticks, positioned in such a way that the enemy could not spot them.

Thus, throughout the entire time “Ares” remained in the terminal, Yevhen knew him only by his voice. He would meet the company commander of the Lviv paratroopers, Oleksandr Skyba, face to face only years later—at a commemorative event marking the anniversary of the end of the airport’s defense—when, amid the formalities, he heard a familiar greeting: “Wishing you good health, my friend!”

At the time, however, having received orders from the commandant, Yevhen made his way to the “Positive” position to rejoin his comrades from the 93rd Brigade. About a dozen of them remained there, and the men—some of them wounded—stubbornly refused to be evacuated one by one. “We’ll leave this place either all together,” they said, “or we’ll stay here to the end.”

Yevhen Kovtun, 2026

On January 13, shelling by tanks and artillery brought down the airport’s control tower—a key defensive position from which Ukrainian artillery fire had been directed.

That same day saw one of the fiercest assaults on the new terminal. Several Russian tanks fired at the defenders at point-blank range from a distance of just 400 meters. Grad rocket systems pounded the building, and in the pauses between barrages, waves of infantry surged forward again and again. Every approach to the Ukrainian positions was littered with the bodies of killed and wounded attackers.

“They kept storming us nonstop for several days in a row,” Yevhen recalls. “At times it nearly came to hand-to-hand combat—the distance between them and us was sometimes less than three or four meters. We were firing at point-blank range.”

Almost miraculously, thanks to the arrival of reinforcements, Ukrainian units in the new terminal managed to launch a counterattack and drive the enemy out of most of the second-floor premises. But they were unable to hold the reclaimed positions: there were too few men, and we were no equal forces with the opponents.

“On January 18 there was another brutal assault,” Yevhen continues. “I don’t know how, but we managed to repel it. It was bitterly cold, and they asked for a ceasefire to collect their ‘two-hundredths’—their dead—and their wounded. And they used that pause: through a hole in the ceiling of the second floor, they dropped explosives down on us.”

The blast caused the walls to collapse, burying Kovtun under the rubble. Wounded, he was dug out by Ivan Zubkov, one of the commanders from the 90th Battalion—the very reinforcements whose arrival the day before had made the counterattack on the second floor possible. After another explosion the following day, Senior Lieutenant Ivan Ivanovych Zubkov himself would die under the debris along with the last defenders of the airport and would be posthumously awarded the title Hero of Ukraine.

Ivan Zubkov/ Photo via https://ukraine-memorial.org

On the night of January 19–20, the final three groups of cyborgs withdrew from the terminal on their own. The first group left in the evening, the second during the night, and the third at dawn.

A group of twelve fighters—among them Kovtun—managed, almost miraculously, to avoid enemy patrols that were sweeping the airfield in search of the last remaining defenders. A dense fog, caused by a sudden thaw and rising temperatures, likely worked in their favor. The group made it to the meteorological tower, where they were met by a Ukrainian evacuation team.

Several surviving defenders chose to stay behind in the terminal together with the wounded. Among them were Ihor Bronevytskyi, Viacheslav Havyanets, and Artem Hrebeniuk.

Ivan Stupak, Kyiv

Photos via Oleksandr Klymenko, publicly accessible sources and the personal archives of Vitalii Hnatenko, Andrii Lisnichuk, Yevhen Kovtun, and Oleksandr Skyba