Two elite Ukrainian troops are being trained by a combat rescuer who has praised their “courage and self-confidence” as they undertake missions of great risk.
Fedir Serdiuk is teaching hundreds of service members, including the nation’s Special Operation Forces (SOF), life-saving first aid and tactical medicine techniques.
He provided insight into how the operators are aiming to ‘win by being better’ by applying all-around battlefield skills on high-risk operations while training the elite forces.
Serdiuk, co-founder of the Pre-Hospital Ukrainian Life-Saving Effort (PULSE), contrasted the Ukrainians’ inter-dependence with the brutality of Vladimir Putin’s forces, who he said were ‘having lunch in trenches alongside their rotting brothers’.
Serdiuk told Metro.co.uk: ‘The SOF operator is very safe and very dangerous at the same time. Safety is ensured by professionalism and skill. The more professional and skillful you are, the more danger and risk you can take on.
‘Because of this, the units can be deployed behind enemy lines or in other places where extraction is difficult. Ukrainian helicopters cannot safely evacuate people from these places because of Russian anti-aircraft systems, so it’s vital that they know how to save lives if an extraction or evacuation is going to take some time. If a unit knows it can save its members and is self-reliant, it will have a very high level of courage and self-confidence.
‘For this reason, we train dedicated medics, but we also train operators. The principle is the same as it is for the SAS and other special forces around the world; if you have that knowledge within a unit, it can be very agile.’
Established in the Cold War and previously part of the Soviet Union’s military intelligence apparatus, the units became part of collaborative efforts between their homeland and Western nations after Ukraine gained its independence in 1991. They have gained vast combat experience since Russia’s military aggression towards its neighbour began in 2014.
The authorised provider is currently delivering training operators with Centre 3, which is similar to the US Green Berets, and the 73rd Naval Centre of Special Operations, which can be compared to the Navy Seals.
After Putin launched the all-out attack, both units have been deployed in the hottest areas of the frontline as well as on missions behind enemy lines.
Serdiuk, 28, who is based in the southern port city of Odessa, has a managerial role that involves scaling up the medical skills base across a wide range of Ukrainian personnel, also including the police and national guard.
The foundation, which he co-founded with Igor Korpusov and Leonid Kopus on the day war broke out, combines training with the supply of modern first aid equipment to medics and lifesavers. Soldiers have spoken to PULSE on camera about how they have used the training to save lives.
One of those to benefit, named as Serhiy, told how he used his new skills to save the lives of wounded comrades — not realising he had enemy shrapnel embedded just millimetres from his carotid artery.
The soldier and a machine gunner he helped rescue, named Oleksandr, made a full recovery after the 56th Rapid Response Unit of the Mechanised Brigade was hit by heavy mortar shelling in the eastern Donetsk region.
Serhiy, who had been preparing to take part in knocking out a Russian position, used duct tape to seal his wound once he realised he had been hit.
‘We train our special forces and the wider military to NATO standards through combat lifesaver courses, which are like first aid-plus courses,’ Serdiuk said. ‘But we don’t stop there. With special forces, it’s all about different scenarios and modelling the situation with a high degree of realism using trucks and forests or whatever environments they are working in.
‘We then combine their tactics and operational requirement and give them the whole picture of how their response should be.
‘The people we train are very well-motivated professionals. They are patriots who are not just there to win by shooting guns, but to win by being better.
‘They consider medicine as part of a wheel comprising different skills.
‘Using this all-round professionalism, they are able to successfully complete missions with a high degree of danger.’
Serdiuk spoke as Ukraine continues a series of counter-offensives in the east and south-east of the country, assessed by the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) to be making ‘small advances’.
The US Institute for the Study of War said last night that the operations were taking place in at least three sectors of the frontline.
With Ukrainian sources reporting that Moscow is using ‘blocking units’ to gun down its own retreating troops. Serdiuk gave a contrasting picture of life on the other side.
‘The Naval operators have posted footage online from a thermal drone showing Ukrainian special forces saving Russians loaded down with equipment who were drowning in the flooded area around the Kakhovka dam,’ he said. ‘The Ukrainian special forces saved them to take them as prisoners of war who can be exchanged for Ukrainians held by the Russians.
‘As they were rescuing them the Russians opened fire — trying to kill the Ukrainians and their own brothers at the same time. But the Ukrainians succeeded in escaping and gave the prisoners food and dry clothing.
‘Now we have five more prisoners to exchange, so we can bring our people back. This is just one example of the brave operations that the Ukrainian SOF units are successfully undertaking.
‘On the Russian side, we have drone footage showing how they think nothing of killing their own wounded soldiers.
‘When the war started it was shocking, now it’s part of reality. In Ukraine and the West we are steeped in the model that our values are shared by all human beings. When the war started we had a reality check as we saw how Russian soldiers can have lunch in the trenches with the rotten bodies of their brothers around them.’
The entrepreneur told Metro.co.uk he is in no doubt that Ukrainian values will ultimately prosper.
‘Military force alone will never rule Ukraine,’ he said. ‘It is a country of now 37 million people who do not want to be ruled by Putin, and a country which refused to be ruled by Stalin. I am sure of our victory.’
The UK MoD today reported ‘likely’ Ukrainian advances on the shattered eastern city of Bakhmut and towards contested areas around Vuhledar and Orikhiv to the south. A Defence Intelligence update on Twitter said that Yevgeny Prigozhin, owner of the Wagner mercenary group, had taken an ‘unambiguously confrontational’ tone towards Russia’s military authorities.
In London, the focus will turn to the rebuilding effort with a joint Ukraine-UK conference due to begin tomorrow.
Hosted by the UK government, the two-day event is aimed at mobilising international support for Ukraine, especially from the private sector.
