Soldier Vladyslav, call sign RIDIK

Having experience of military service and a desire to defend my home and family, I joined the army in the first days of the full-scale invasion. On the 3rd of March, 2022, I was mobilised to the territorial defense forces. I was immediately assigned to the 122nd Brigade. For a long time, our unit was defending Odesa and Mykolaiv regions, and after the liberation of Kherson, we took part in its defence.

 
In the autumn of 2023, we were sent to the Left Bank of Dnipro river to perform combat missions. On the 3rd of December 2023, while changing combat positions, our group was ambushed. Two of my comrades were immediately wounded, and my friend and I were taken prisoners.
 
When we were being led to the occupiers' positions through mined fields, my comrade and I looked at each other and thought about how to resist. We carried unloaded weapons on our backs, and my comrade managed to hide one full machine gun magazine on his person. At some point, I stepped on an anti-personnel mine and there was an explosion. Perhaps that was what saved us. I do not know why the occupier did not kill me on the spot, but instead ran away and hid behind a tree. This gave us a little time to get the magazine and install it into the machine gun. And the shooting started. Bullets were whizzing over our heads, but we were lucky - the orc was killed. That's how we survived.
 
Then three endless days of evacuation followed.

My brother-in-arms went to get help, as I could not walk on my own because a part of my right foot was torn off. I put on a tourniquet and waited. At that moment, drones started circling overhead. To avoid being killed, I didn't move and pretended to be dead. When everything was quiet, I took out my phone (which the orcs had miraculously not taken away) and contacted the commander. A drone was deployed to search for me. In the evening, they found me. But because of the fierce fighting, help arrived only at dawn. We hadn't reached a few hundred metres to the evacuation site when the copters came again and dropped grenade launcher fragmentation round on us. Two more of my brothers were wounded, and I was additionally injured in the left leg. To take cover from the shelling, we found a 
flooded dugout and waited for more than a day for the opportunity to move on.
 
I was admitted to a hospital in Kherson three days after I was wounded. There they performed an operation - an amputation with hip joint disarticulation. They stabilised my condition and sent me to Odesa for treatment a few days later.

 
I understand that after amputation, one can live an active life. So far, I have only one plan for the future - to get a functional prosthesis and learn to walk again.
 
The amount of money provided by the state is not enough to buy a prosthesis that will help me be mobile. So I turned to a charity for help in purchasing a knee unit.

 

COLLECTED AND TRANSFERRED: UAH 390,012