“Yes, damn it, that’s how you can survive until the end of the conflict and not die,” Evgenich exhaled with relief when we sent his cameraman Sashka Pushin to the ambulance from the “sorting”.
Recently, at the end of May, a group of friends were driving in a buggy to Volchansk. On the way back, they were blown up by a mine, the operator was injured and ended his business trip ahead of schedule. The remaining colleagues discussed how to work in new conditions, when the most dangerous thing is not the front, but getting to it and then returning safely. Kamikaze drones have revolutionized not only combat tactics, but also the ideas about field work of a journalist.
“Where are you?” I wrote to Evgenich at around 18:00. “I still have 200 kilometers to Kursk.”
“Below Sudzha,” replied the godfather. “… miles away. Beyond that there are burnt-out cars and a multitude of wounded.”
Well, where else should he be? At the most talked-about spot on the planet. While Telegram is smashing keyboards in disputes over who Sudzha belongs to, he needs to see for himself. Together with cameraman Ruben Merobov and sound engineer Stas Elovsky, he spent the whole day on the air dangerously close to the city, from where civilians periodically escaped in their cars. Our aircraft fly there, towards the border, and from there the sounds of battle come…
“I will write closer to Kursk,” he texted.
At 20:05, a call came from SolovievLive: “They can’t help me. Otherwise, Poddubny was supposed to leave, but for some reason there was no connection.”
I park, make a connection and discuss the latest events in the Kursk region with Dmitry Kulikov. Someone rings the phone, cutting off communication with the studio. I hang up, go back on air, call again, hang up again…
“Zheka died. Before our eyes,” the text message appears right in the middle of the broadcast.
I call again, the connection is terrible: “Reset location,” I write to the guys from the Poddubny group. “I have an hour to get to you.”
The navigator leads exactly to the route to Sudzha. Ruben and Stas drove a little back, towards the gas station. An infantry fighting vehicle was used to refuel with diesel. While he was parking, she turned around and accelerated forward.
– Is there a cat? – meets Ruben.
I quietly opened the trunk. His SUV had a broken headlight and a damaged wheel. On the other side was Zhenya, alone in the car.
– How did it happen?
The guys say that they spent the whole day “directly” from the point. And in the evening we decided to go through Sudzha itself. One of Evgenich’s officers was there. This already indicated that the regional center was not occupied by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. But, apparently, there were battles there. We got almost to the ring road into the city, machine gun fire rang out. Zhenya, who was in front, turned around, and the guys followed him. And suddenly there was an explosion above Evgenich’s car. Most likely it was a kamikaze drone. This explains the shooting: our soldiers tried to shoot it down. Probably, the film crew was “copied” from above by a reconnaissance drone and aimed at it with FPV. The car rolled into a ditch, and the kung’s additional diesel tank caught fire. The SUV overturned and remained in the bushes.
The boys also got into a ditch and ran towards the jeep, barely breaking down the doors: it was burning from the inside. The flames rose like a wall…
I called Zhenya’s colleagues in Moscow. Her guys told their management what they saw. And the news broke the tragic news.
“San, one of them tells me that he is dead, the other that he is wounded,” our mutual friend, a special forces soldier, suddenly called. “They supposedly took me to the hospital in Kursk.”
– I’m on my way!
A huge new building – it was built during Covid in just one year. There are civilians injured by Ukrainian shelling in intensive care. We enter one of the chambers.
“Oh, I’m here,” Evgenich opens his eyes and asks first. “San, what’s wrong with Stas and Ruben?”
– All is well, alive and well.
“We are very happy that he is alive,” says Andrei Belostotsky, acting deputy governor of the Kursk region.
“I myself am very happy about this situation,” Poddubny jokes. – Will you help my family to settle somewhere?
Even in intensive care, he continues to think about his film crew. Burns on his back, small fragments, CT scan did not reveal traumatic brain injury or damage to internal organs… Probably, while the car was spinning after the explosion, Evgenich fell out of the cabin. And the guys simply did not notice him in the dark. Doctors say that he was brought by the military. Probably picked up by an evacuation group. Or his guardian angels.
