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Troopers wrapped in blankets and sleeping baggage, some lacking legs and arms, have been hoisted into the helicopters, whose rotors by no means stopped spinning. They lifted off with eight or 9 wounded fighters that day, Flint stated, a few of whom have been acutely aware sufficient to point out off cellphone movies of the extreme combating they’d endured.
The March 21 mission, captured on movies offered by Flint, lasted solely 20 minutes on the bottom. “There was simply this sense of happiness, emotional satisfaction that we have been in a position to get these guys out,” Flint stated.
In all, Operation Air Hall, as the hassle was identified to contributors, managed to land helicopters at Azovstal seven instances throughout the subsequent two weeks and rescue 85 gravely wounded troopers, Flint stated. A closely sedated Sergeant Tsymbal was amongst these evacuated.
However the helicopters additionally introduced in different troopers, largely volunteers, together with Pvt. Nikita Zherdev of the Azov Regiment. His father had died within the shelling of Mariupol weeks earlier, and he wrote his sister earlier than taking off telling her to be taught to care for herself. He didn’t inform her what he thought: that he didn’t anticipate to depart alive.
“As quickly as we landed at Azovstal, I understood that, wow, issues are actually taking place right here,” he stated. “All the things was coated in smoke. All the things was underneath fireplace. The individuals who greeted us, shouted, ‘Quicker, quicker, quicker — there are airstrikes each 5 minutes, the jets are coming.’”
A local of Mariupol, Non-public Zherdev already knew the troops at Azovstal, however the males he discovered have been withered specters of these troopers, hungry and exhausted and coated in blood and gun oil after weeks of fixed combating. They have been shocked to see him.
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