By Felix Hoske
KRAMATORSK, Ukraine, July 22 (Reuters) - Serhii Krynitskyi watched the life seep out of the only man who had shared his living hell.
He and his comrade had survived nearly a year together in a foxhole on the front lines. They'd killed Russian soldiers and scavenged for food among the dead. They'd argued and laughed, amidst the horror.
Now, Krynitskyi was alone.
The Ukrainian soldier aimed his phone camera at his companion's lifeless body, wedged inside the dugout. One blood-stained leg
was exposed. An artery sliced open by shrapnel from a bomb dropped by a drone. He bled and bled.
"In the morning, you're joking together," the 42-year-old told the camera numbly, his face smudged and worn. "And by the evening, it's the gates of heaven calling."
It was day 326.
The men's isolated position is a consequence of the way drone warfare is revolutionizing the battlefield. The technology has forced both sides to abandon the age-old practice of massing troops, artillery and armoured vehicles in a relatively narrow corridor along the long front line. Such visible targets are easy prey for the cheap unmanned aerial vehicles that both sides have flooded the skies with.
Instead, both armies now have tiny teams, sometimes of just two or three soldiers, scattered in small dugouts hollowed into the ground across a battlefield some 30 km (20 miles) wide, known as the "kill zone" because of the constant drone threat. These groups seek to evade detection and infiltrate gaps in enemy defences, often taking huge risks for minimal territorial gains. They are typically stuck for months in their positions because it's so dangerous to rotate troops in and out.
Krynitskyi was deployed near the town of Chasiv Yar in eastern Ukraine from April 20, 2025 to March 31, 2026, he and his brigade said. He filmed a series of video diaries with a cellphone, powered at times by batteries collected from downed Russian drones. He documented, in expletive-laden recordings, the inhumanities and absurdities of life in a cramped redoubt, about 3 by 4 metres, carved beneath the front lines of a grinding war.
Reuters reviewed 22 videos, which were provided by his unit to bring Krynitskyi's story to a wider audience, and interviewed the soldier after his deployment to piece together this account of his 346-day stint at the front, almost all of it spent in a foxhole, which earned him the country's highest military award.
He endured terrifying cycles of violence: Every couple of days, Russian soldiers would advance on foot in small groups of typically two or three. They sometimes came as close as 20 metres before the Ukrainians fired at them.
He said he'd killed 23 enemies at close range during his deployment. He most clearly recalled one of his first: a soldier injured by a grenade. The Russian had faked surrendering before taking aim at him with a rifle.
"Well, I reacted," Krynitskyi said. "He stopped aiming at me."
In a clip from November 24, more than 200 days into his deployment, Krynitskyi trained his camera on the bodies of two enemy soldiers in the eerie calm after repelling an assault. "Fools," he said. "Crawled up where they don't belong."
Krynitskyi's unit, the 24th Mechanised Brigade, confirmed that he had reported 23 enemy kills. Reuters couldn't verify all aspects of the infantryman's account.
Russia's defence ministry didn't respond to a request for comment about the changing nature of the battlefield and the experiences of soldiers on both sides.
COLLECTING GUNS, SMOKES
Krynitskyi was not a military man.
He had worked in farming and construction until an injury left him in a month-long coma. After that, he scratched out a living as a rabbit breeder.
In late 2024, he was rounded up by draft officers in his village of Bilohir'ya in western Ukraine. They put him on a bus, brought him to the city of Rivne and trained him quickly.
He was assigned to the 24th Mechanised Brigade and sent to the front in the east, where Russia's invading army, significantly outnumbering Ukraine's, was attacking the so-called "fortress belt" of strategic cities in the Donetsk region.
He and two other privates dug in near Chasiv Yar in April 2025. There, they excavated a foxhole, and Krynitskyi would subsequently spend almost a year living under the ground as enemy forces closed in. The men knew the deeper they dug, the better their chance of survival. Krynitskyi joked he didn't know whether to call the hole a shelter or a grave.
When their refuge was hit by drones, they had to excavate the area anew. One comrade was killed early in the deployment by an attack that left Krynitskyi concussed and temporarily without hearing. Reuters withheld the names of the two dead soldiers at the request of their brigade.
Krynitskyi and his remaining comrade also fought the elements, plugging holes to block frigid drafts and capping lookout shifts at two hours. Any longer was unbearable.
Sometimes, three or four days passed before a re-supply drone could make it through enemy fire. To survive, Krynitskyi picked food and sundries from fallen Russians.
The infantryman, who has two teenage children, started filming the diaries in August 2025, to show people when he got back home what he went through and to remind himself. Reuters verified the date of all the videos using the original file metadata.
In one video, in February this year, he surveyed the cigarettes he'd gathered from dead enemy troops: Camels, Winstons, Chesterfields and others. He obsessed over the packets, "like some nerd collects stamps."
In another video days later, he showcased mud-caked "trophy" rifles he'd seized.
"This is my small arsenal," Krynitskyi said, proudly counting off the 13 firearms, arranged in a row.
DESPERATE ATTEMPT TO SAVE HIS COMRADE
Russia's full-scale invasion of its neighbour in 2022 unleashed staggering carnage. While neither side discloses death tolls, the Center for Strategic & International Studies estimates Russian battlefield casualties at 1.4 million, including killed, wounded and missing, and Ukrainian forces have suffered between 525,000 and 625,000 casualties.
Krynitskyi dug his foxhole on one of the deadliest stretches of the kill zone. On March 11, he heard an explosion outside.
He rushed out into the brisk spring air and found his comrade on the ground, hit in the leg by a drone attack. Krynitskyi dragged him back into the hole and frantically tore through his thick cotton trousers to find the wound.
He applied a tourniquet. It was too late to save him.
Upon radioing command, Krynitskyi was ordered to abandon the position as the Russians encroached. That night he crawled out of the dugout for the last time to join a few fellow infantrymen holed up nearby for almost three more weeks. Then came a perilous march to safety 25 km away made more difficult by his weakened state after months underground.
He left behind the body of his friend - a man he had come to know deeply through countless conversations between enemy assaults.
In May, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy presented Krynitskyi with the Hero of Ukraine medal for personal bravery.
Ukraine's army is full of men like him, who have endured the unimaginable, said Andriy Derun, a military manager at leading Ukrainian charity Come Back Alive, which provides equipment and other support for the armed forces.
"It can completely destroy a person," said Derun, who frequently speaks with frontline troops.
Back in Kramatorsk, the eastern city where he returned after his time at the front, Krynitskyi described the mental toll exacted by the marathon stints on the front: "Many guys have gone out of their mind". Nearly two months since he left the front line, the scars inside show on the surface. He fights back tears. His hands shake.
During recent visits Krynitskyi made to schools near his home to speak to pupils about his experience, he began to understand better how others may benefit from his sacrifices.
"I realized there, in those schools, that it wasn't in vain that I defended our land and these children – so they could study, see the clear sky."
(Reporting by Felix Hoske in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine; Writing by Dan Peleschuk; Editing by Pravin Char, Mike Collett-White and Daniel Flynn)
