He Was Ready to Die, but Not to Surrender

After seven days hiding in a dank and dark tunnel deep in the bowels of the sprawling Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol as the city burned around him, Pfc. Oleksandr Ivantsov was on the verge of collapse.

President Volodymyr Zelensky had ordered Ukrainian soldiers to lay down their weapons after 80 days of resistance and surrender. But Private Ivantsov had other ideas.

“When I signed up for this mission, I realized that most likely I would die,” he recalled. “I was ready to die in battle, but morally I was not ready to surrender.”

He knew his plan might sound a little crazy, but at the time, he was convinced he had a better chance of surviving by hiding out than by surrendering himself to Russians, whose widespread abuse of prisoners of war was well known to Ukrainian troops.

So he knocked a hole in a wall to get to a small tunnel, stashed some supplies and made plans to stay hidden for 10 days, hoping that the Russians who had taken control of the ruined plant would let down their guard by then, allowing him to creep through the ruins unnoticed and make his way into the city he once called home.

But after a week, he had gone through the six cans of stewed chicken and 10 cans of sardines and almost all of the eight 1.5 liter bottles of water he had secreted away.