After enduring 491 days in the kill zone and forced to amputate his right leg with a blunt knife after losing his left to frostbite, Kostiantyn Vlasenko received the call he thought might never come.
For the previous 231 days, the Ukrainian infantryman had been alone, hiding within a cast-iron furnace in an abandoned school, after his only comrade, callsign ‘Baski’, had been killed.
He and Baski had found refuge here last winter after a cramped underground concrete drainage pipe where they had spent their first eight months flooded, forcing them to flee.
But there were so many enemy aircraft around this position
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