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Serhii Tyschenko, a Ukrainian combat medic, spent 472 days in a bunker. His case appears to be an extreme example of a problem that has long plagued Kyiv’s military.
Sgt. Serhii Tyschenko last month in his home village near Kyiv, Ukraine.Credit...Sasha Maslov for The New York Times
Dec. 27, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
The soldier suspected early on that this frontline rotation would be difficult. But 472 days straight, in a bunker, under fire?
“I didn’t expect it to last so long,” the soldier, Sgt. Serhii Tyschenko, said one recent afternoon at his home outside Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, his wife glued to his side. “I hoped it would be a month, two months at most.”
Instead, he spent more than a year underground in a damp bunker witho…
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Serhii Tyschenko, a Ukrainian combat medic, spent 472 days in a bunker. His case appears to be an extreme example of a problem that has long plagued Kyiv’s military.
Sgt. Serhii Tyschenko last month in his home village near Kyiv, Ukraine.Credit...Sasha Maslov for The New York Times
Dec. 27, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
The soldier suspected early on that this frontline rotation would be difficult. But 472 days straight, in a bunker, under fire?
“I didn’t expect it to last so long,” the soldier, Sgt. Serhii Tyschenko, said one recent afternoon at his home outside Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, his wife glued to his side. “I hoped it would be a month, two months at most.”
Instead, he spent more than a year underground in a damp bunker without fresh air or even a ray of sunlight for much of the time. “It becomes very hard mentally,” he said.
Lengthy rotations have long been a problem in Ukraine’s fight against Russian forces, as Kyiv has struggled with troop shortages. The ubiquity of drones has made things worse because it is nearly impossible for soldiers to move positions without being spotted.
But overly long rotations damage morale and risk psychological harm, military experts say, which can contribute to further troop shortages from desertion or burnout. Ukraine’s military has acknowledged the problem and pledged to address it.
“To remain on the front lines for so many days, under extraordinarily difficult conditions, is beyond the limits of human endurance,” said a retired colonel, Vladyslav Seleznyov, who served 25 years in Ukraine’s military.
“This is unacceptable,” he added. “Scheduled rotations must take place.”
Sergeant Tyschenko’s brigade commander, Col. Dmytro Dobush, acknowledged that his rotation was exceptionally long, calling him a “true patriot” who “performed an incredible feat.”
“Such a rotation is atypically long,” Colonel Dobush said in an interview, “but under conditions of intense combat and significant personnel shortages, such cases are not isolated. Unfortunately, these are the realities of the current stage of the war.”
Sergeant Tyschenko said: “I honestly don’t know how I coped. Even today, I don’t understand how I managed to endure it.”
‘I knew they would take me.’
Born in a village about 30 miles east of Ukraine’s capital, Sergeant Tyschenko, 46, was raised in an orphanage. He said he always considered himself to be “very weak” emotionally, largely because of his lifelong shyness.
He became a veterinarian, married and raised five children in a home filled with pet rabbits and birds.
He was working at a dairy farm in February 2023, when, a year into Russia’s full-scale invasion, he was called to a military recruitment center.
“I knew they would take me,” he said.
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A military hat belonging to Sergeant Tyschenko. He was recruited a year into the war, and worked as a combat medic.Credit...Sasha Maslov for The New York Times
For a man who said he struggled to ask strangers for directions, leaving his family and adjusting to military life was jarring and depressing.
He became a combat medic. His first frontline rotation, later that year in eastern Ukraine, lasted about 45 days. Two more 30-day rotations followed, then a short leave. His family went to meet him in the frontline city of Sloviansk.
“I didn’t expect them to come because it was far and risky,” he said. “I was very happy to see them.”
That was the last time he would hug his wife and children for more than a year.
‘You start counting every day.’
In July 2024, he was transferred to the 30th Brigade and headed to a new position in the Donetsk region. He was not told, he said, how long his rotation would last. A spokesman for his brigade confirmed that rotation lengths are not predetermined.
But the sergeant said he assumed he would be in the post for 30 to 40 days maximum, as he had been before.
“You start counting every day,” he said.
He recalled his first day and night, traveling to the position. With three other soldiers, he walked through bushes and tall grass in the dark for about a mile. Drones buzzed overhead, but he thought they only observed.
The troops crawled into an underground bunker in the middle of a field. The bunker was less than five feet high in most places, its sleeping area even lower in a maze of cold, damp passages.
There were no mattresses; water-resistant sleeping bags provided the greatest comfort. “The moisture was the thing you felt the most,” Sergeant Tyschenko said.
More soldiers arrived in the bunker, bringing the group to around eight. At first, the men obtained supplies from a nearby position where they could also call family using a satellite internet device. But then things became more dangerous.
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A sleeping area in Sergeant Tyschenko’s bunker in April.Credit...Serhii Tyschenko
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A selfie Sergeant Tyschenko took in September 2024 during his 472-day rotation.Credit...Serhii Tyschenko
On Sept. 16, the position itself came under attack. Some in his unit were killed. Nobody was sent in to replace the dead, and there was no information, he said, on whether replacements would arrive. That is when he realized, he added, that he would not be going home anytime soon.
“We had already been told that there were no people available to replace us,” he said. “It became clear to me that this was going to be long.”
‘There was no one to replace us.’
Starting in February 2025, Russian drone attacks intensified, and the men could no longer safely come out of the bunker. Fearful of being spotted, they covered a small window in the bunker, and from that point on, they did not see the sun. They relied on their phones’ 24-hour clocks and calendars to mark the passage of time.
Ukraine’s military started dropping supplies by drone that the men risked retrieving at night: charged power banks, canned meat, ready-made porridge. Sergeant Tyschenko smiled recalling how one soldier with him was a chef who requested ingredients over the radio to make pancakes. But there were moments when food and water ran low.
Serhii Tyschenko
All the while, Sergeant Tyschenko said, they were under attack. Russian forces dropped grenades and cans stuffed with explosives, and even made it to the edge of the trench that hid the bunker.
“We kept hoping, hoping, and it still dragged on and on,” Sergeant Tyschenko said. “Eventually, we accepted that, in the end, we might only be withdrawn when the war ends because there was no one to replace us.”
‘We kept going without stopping.’
While they waited, a lot happened outside the bunker.
Ukraine mounted a cross-border offensive in the Kursk region of Russia. Moscow’s forces advanced in eastern Ukraine, near Pokrovsk and into Chasiv Yar.
North Korean troops joined the fight alongside Russian forces. From Western allies, Ukraine received F-16s and gained approval to launch long-range strikes into Russia.
There was a new U.S. president, a new pope.
None of those developments reached Sergeant Tyschenko’s bunker. It was completely cut off. They had a radio, but it only communicated information about their company — not the rest of the battlefield, or the world beyond.
Their time in the bunker took a toll. Muscles weakened, Sergeant Tyschenko said. The cramped conditions led to back pain.
Hope flickered when a radio call came this fall, telling Sergeant Tyschenko and another soldier that they would soon be allowed to leave. But the weather did not cooperate, and the evacuation was put on hold.
About 20 days later, they tried again. The two men crawled out of the bunker into a trench scattered with their trash and the remains of Russian soldiers.
The first move was a 500-yard dash to the nearby position that had internet access — the start of a grueling trek.
“Our legs felt like cotton,” he said, adding, “We could barely walk, but we kept going without stopping.”
When they finally made it fully out, the first thing he wanted to do, he said, was wash up and call his family. A proper reunion came later, at his home.
“I’m still surprised by how quickly I adjusted to the conditions,” he said at home, halfway into a 30-day leave, where his wife and daughter would not let him out of their sight. Yet there he was adjusting again, squinting and rubbing his eyes in the light until a power outage darkened the room.
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Sergeant Tyschenko with his daughter Anicia and wife, Oksana, last month. Credit...Sasha Maslov for The New York Times
Days later, Sergeant Tyschenko was named a Hero of Ukraine — the country’s highest honor. A presidential communiqué noted the length and dangers of his rotation.
Sergeant Tyschenko said his experience was “not normal,” but he had no indignation or anger in his voice. He questioned the military value of experiences like his, though.
“Earlier, if we engaged in combat, we could jump out and act,” he said. “Now, everything is dominated by drones. So is there any point in having people just sit in a hole?”
Two weeks later, he joined his new post in Sloviansk. There, he helps treat soldiers evacuated from the front line. Recently, his past and present collided when a patient was brought in.
It was the pancake chef from the bunker — evacuated after a 10-month rotation.
Sergeant Tyschenko has not been told how long his own rotation will last this time, he said. Nor has he asked.
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