He came under shellfire while delivering humanitarian aid to the liberated villages in Kharkiv region!

Photographer from Kyiv Serhiy Tumasov has been helping war victims since 2014. With the outbreak of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, his volunteering activities came to the fore.

The most difficult thing for Serhiy is not even the injuries themselves, but the fact that he will not be able to move actively for the next six months.

My home and place of living is in Kyiv. This is my permanent place of residence. Since the beginning of the war, I have been travelling more throughout Ukraine with a humanitarian mission. I received a press card (press pass) and started making trips to places liberated from the invaders. Our staff identified that several villages here have been suffering from the occupation, and so we decided to bring some food and basic-needs items for the inhabitants of these villages.

I remember quite well the name of one village. It is Myrna Dolyna (Peace Valley). A shell burst in front of us. We were driving on the road and when we were approaching the village, the shelling started. The military accompanied us there. They said that they [the Russians] were deliberately aiming at our humanitarian cargo.

We were coming by two vehicles. One of them managed to slip through and we came under shellfire. The road to the village was a country road. We were a civilian [humanitarian] convoy. Our bus was of bright yellow colour so that we could be seen as carrying civilian/humanitarian goods.

As soon as we drove out of the woods, literally a few seconds later, we saw mine explosions in front of us, and then I don’t remember anything that happened next. I was in a state of shell shock not too long. I came to my senses in several dozens of seconds.

I remained on the bus and I could not feel my legs. Such a special feeling… The first feeling was an attempt to understand whether I was alive or dead. Then I heard that mines were flying, but there’s nothing I could do. I could not move my hands.

And there was a moment when I saw some shell bursts. The driver drove faster for us to slip through. I took out my camera and wanted to take some pictures, and at that moment, a mine hit our bus. I think the fact that I pressed the camera to my face saved my eyes. I had the last shell fragment taken out just the day before yesterday. Some splinters were taken out from my forehead and from my ear.

There were three of us on the bus and two of us were thrown out of the window. A guy sitting next to me was badly injured, while the driver did not get any scratches. Thanks to that, he saved us. He pulled me out of the bus because those damned Russians kept bombing. And there were a few more direct hits to the bus. I think the driver was in a state of shock, although he was on his feet. The first thing he did was taking out a first aid kit and filling my wound with a gel. He tried to pull us, but there was a ploughed field under our feet so his feet clung to the earth. I told him, “Go and tear off the broken plastic casing from the bus’s dashboard and put my legs on it.” He placed my legs and made an improvised splint. He dragged us to a tree.

The Russians kept covering the area with mines all the time. And then, when the other guy and I were lying in a small pit, the driver said, “I’m going to look for someone, to call for help, as no one is here.” But luckily for us, servicemen from the 93rd Brigade were driving by and they came up. When they were putting us on a pickup vehicle, the Russians probably reloaded… I remember four minutes of silence.

And as soon as we left, they started shelling again. The guys said the area was covered with shellfire from Grad MLRS, but I did not really understand it then.

I was first taken to one hospital and then transferred to another one. Then an ambulance from here, an ambulance drove from Kharkiv and from Pervomaysk. I was taken from one vehicle and put on another one right on the highway. Shin bones in the joint… they had to make a complex operation as I had quite a complex fracture. A multi-fragmentary fracture was here. An open fracture with a deep wound, heavy blood loss, on the verge of loss of consciousness. But the guys [doctors] seem to have put it together well.

I have been a volunteer since 2014. I was not actively involved in the volunteering activity in recent years. It was mostly in 2014 and 2015, with the beginning of the russian invasion. I did not have any doubts whether to be a volunteer or not. You must do everything for your country to be independent and free. A free country means a free me. I did not understand how it could be otherwise. Then the volunteering activity reduced. We provided some help from time to time, but from the outbreak of the full-scale invasion, from 24 February, I resumed my activity as a volunteer and contributed all the money I could. I am quite a well-known photographer in Ukraine and I am also known in the world. I started working on several projects to show Europe the horrors of the war.

It feels like we are protecting the whole nice world that exists. The most difficult thing for me is to lie in bed and not be able to do anything physically.

It is now the time when I have to restructure my lifestyle and my work models so that I could work in bed.

I replay it in my memory… The most surprising thing is that I seemed to have seen this shell some 10 minutes before. I seemed to see it. There are certain signs in the energy fields, but I did not pay much attention to it. Well, and if I had paid, what would I have done then? Would not have gone? Of course, I would still go. Union.

We become like one team, one community of volunteers.

When I called some people, while working on the project, they said, “We’re ready to work for free.” It is a union where people work in the name of the nation. This is amazing. On the tenth day, or even earlier, I got the feeling that we won.

I made a big post on Facebook that we had already won. Well, the war will continue, Ukrainians will pay the price, and the price will be quite high, but putin has already lost and russia has lost. Surely, russia lost even before it decided to enter our territory. Perhaps the wrongdoing that russia has been committing for the last hundreds of years gives us confidence that we will still win. Yes, and I believe in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.