KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — Serhii Krynitskyi watched helplessly as the last man by his side took his final breath.
The two Ukrainian soldiers had spent close to a year together in a small underground dugout on the front lines — enduring enemy attacks, scrounging for food among fallen soldiers, and finding moments of dark humor in the midst of unimaginable conditions. Then Krynitskyi was left completely alone.
He pointed his phone camera at his comrade’s lifeless body, crammed inside the narrow shelter. One blood-soaked leg was visible. A drone-dropped bomb had sent shrapnel slicing through an artery, and there was nothing to be done.
“In the morning, you’re joking together,” the 42-year-old said flatly into the camera, his face dirty and exhausted. “And by the evening, it’s the gates of heaven calling.”
It was day 326.
The extreme isolation these men endured reflects a dramatic shift in how modern warfare is being fought. Drone technology has forced both sides in the Ukraine conflict to abandon traditional tactics of concentrating large numbers of troops, artillery, and armored vehicles along the front. Those kinds of visible formations have become easy targets for the inexpensive unmanned aircraft that now fill the skies on both sides of the conflict.
In their place, both armies now rely on tiny teams — sometimes just two or three soldiers — scattered across small underground positions spread across a battlefield roughly 30 kilometers, or about 20 miles, wide. This area has come to be called the “kill zone” because of the relentless drone threat. These small groups try to avoid detection and find weaknesses in enemy defenses, often taking enormous risks for little territorial gain. Rotating troops in and out is so dangerous that soldiers frequently remain stuck in their positions for months at a time.
Krynitskyi was stationed near the town of Chasiv Yar in eastern Ukraine from April 20, 2025 to March 31, 2026, according to him and his brigade. Using a cellphone — sometimes charged with batteries salvaged from downed Russian drones — he recorded a series of video journals documenting the bizarre and brutal daily reality of living in a cramped underground space roughly 3 by 4 meters in size, directly beneath an active war zone.
Reuters reviewed 22 of those videos, which were shared by his unit to help bring his story to the public. After his deployment ended, the news agency also sat down with Krynitskyi to reconstruct the full account of his 346 days at the front — nearly all of it spent underground — an ordeal that ultimately earned him Ukraine’s highest military honor.
Throughout his time there, he endured relentless cycles of violence. Every few days, small groups of Russian soldiers — typically two or three at a time — would advance on foot, sometimes closing to within 20 meters before the Ukrainians opened fire.
Krynitskyi said he killed 23 enemy soldiers at close range during his time there. One of his earliest encounters stood out most clearly: a Russian soldier wounded by a grenade who pretended to surrender, then raised his rifle.
“Well, I reacted,” Krynitskyi said. “He stopped aiming at me.”
In footage recorded on November 24, more than 200 days into his deployment, he turned the camera on two enemy soldiers lying dead after their assault was repelled. “Fools,” he said. “Crawled up where they don’t belong.”
His unit, the 24th Mechanised Brigade, confirmed that he had reported 23 enemy kills. Reuters was unable to independently verify every detail of his account. Russia’s defense ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
Before the war, Krynitskyi had no military background whatsoever. He had worked in farming and construction until an injury put him in a coma for a month. After recovering, he made ends meet raising rabbits.
In late 2024, military draft officers showed up in his village of Bilohir’ya in western Ukraine. He was put on a bus, taken to the city of Rivne, and given rapid training before being assigned to the 24th Mechanised Brigade and sent east.
He and two fellow privates dug in near Chasiv Yar in April 2025, carving out a foxhole that Krynitskyi would call home for nearly a year as Russian forces pressed closer. The deeper they dug, the better their odds of survival — though Krynitskyi joked he wasn’t sure whether to call it a shelter or a grave.
When drone strikes damaged their position, they had to dig it out again. Early in the deployment, one of the original three soldiers was killed in an attack that left Krynitskyi with a concussion and temporary hearing loss. Reuters withheld the names of both soldiers who died at the request of their brigade.
Krynitskyi and his surviving companion also battled the elements, sealing gaps against bitter cold and limiting lookout shifts to two hours — any longer was simply too much to bear.
Sometimes three or four days would pass without a resupply drone making it through enemy fire. To keep going, Krynitskyi took food and other supplies from the bodies of fallen Russian soldiers.
The soldier, who has two teenage children, began recording his video diaries in August 2025, wanting to have something to show people when he returned home — and to remind himself of what he had endured. Reuters confirmed the dates of all videos using the original file metadata.
In one recording from February of this year, he laid out cigarettes collected from dead enemy troops — Camels, Winstons, Chesterfields, and more — saying he’d become obsessed with them “like some nerd collects stamps.” Days later, another video showed off a row of 13 mud-covered rifles he had seized.
“This is my small arsenal,” he said proudly.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has resulted in catastrophic losses on both sides. Neither country publicly releases casualty figures, but the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates Russian battlefield casualties — killed, wounded, and missing — at 1.4 million, while Ukrainian forces are estimated to have suffered between 525,000 and 625,000 casualties.
On March 11, Krynitskyi heard an explosion just outside his position. He rushed out and found his comrade on the ground, struck in the leg by a drone attack. He dragged him back inside and tore through thick clothing to reach the wound, applying a tourniquet — but it wasn’t enough to save him.
After radioing his commanders, Krynitskyi was ordered to leave the position as Russian troops moved closer. That night he crawled out of the dugout for the last time, linking up with a small group of nearby soldiers for nearly three more weeks before making a grueling 25-kilometer march to safety — made harder by his physically weakened condition after months underground.
He was forced to leave his companion’s body behind — a man he had come to know deeply through endless conversations between enemy attacks.
In May, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy personally presented Krynitskyi with the Hero of Ukraine medal for personal bravery.
Andriy Derun, a military manager at the Ukrainian charity Come Back Alive — which supplies equipment and support to the armed forces — said Ukraine’s military is filled with soldiers who have endured similarly unimaginable circumstances.
“It can completely destroy a person,” said Derun, who regularly speaks with troops on the front lines.
Now back in Kramatorsk, the eastern city where he returned after his deployment, Krynitskyi spoke openly about the psychological damage caused by extended front-line service. “Many guys have gone out of their mind,” he said. Nearly two months after leaving the front, the internal wounds are visible. He struggles to hold back tears. His hands tremble.
He has since visited schools near his home to speak with students about what he experienced. Those visits, he said, helped him make sense of everything.
“I realized there, in those schools, that it wasn’t in vain that I defended our land and these children — so they could study, see the clear sky.”
