Oleksandr Androshchuk

My name is Androshchuk Oleksandr Mykolaiovych. I first joined the service in 2015, specifically the Azov Battalion at the time. It was a fun scene, as most of the people were either football fans or part of the fan community. The vibe was incredible, especially in the beginning. It felt less like military service, and more like summer camp. Later, as the unit got more and more professional, there were certain standards.

I was there in 2015 and 2016. The second time, I just went to the enlistment office on February 24, 2022. I ended up in the 101st Brigade and served there for almost a year until I got injured.

In 2015-2016, it was Azov, and we all were friends. Of course, there was a commander and we followed his orders, but outside of that we were pals and the hierarchy was quite flat. In 2022, everything got very formal. Once, I addressed an officer by his first name, and he said: “I’m not Serioha.” I thought that maybe I mixed up his name, but it turned out it should have been “Lieutenant, sir.” My initial reaction was, what the fuck?

I went back to the job I had before the full-scale invasion, I work in IT. Also, after participating in the Invictus Games, I’ve started doing a lot of different sports. Wheelchair rugby, golf, and wakeboarding. I’m open to new experiences, so maybe there will be something else.

Without a doubt, my wife supports me in almost everything. So do my friends and comrades, and my children. Basically, everyone around me. I’m proud of the circle of people I’ve surrounded myself with, because they all support me, and I always have someone to turn to for help.

To be honest, it’s been a long time since I’ve had any truly hard days. Everything in my life is moving along, and everything seems to be full of positivity. All these different activities that distract me from the negativity. It’s constant movement. I guess that’s what distracts me and keeps me going during tough times.

Mostly places from my childhood. Mykolaivka in Crimea. It’s a coastline village near Saky. I spent a lot of time there when I was a kid. Also, a vacation resort in the Kyiv Oblast near Bohuslav. We went there every summer with our parents and met the same families every year.

And I keep revisiting Asia in my thoughts.

It was quite an adventure we had with my friend and my kids’ godfather. At some point, friends of ours went on a journey around the world and found out that in Korea, you can make good money as a manual laborer. “Do you want to come?” We applied for a visa the same day and landed in Korea four days later.

We worked in Korea for three months and traveled Asia for two more months. We rode our motorcycles all across Vietnam. Hong Kong, Macau, Thailand… Spent some time exploring Bangkok. We took the train to central Thailand and hitchhiked through the rest of the country. We didn’t need any fancy apartments. In Hong Kong, we stayed in the cheapest hotel first, and our second night we spent the night in a changing room at the public beach. It was cold and not comfortable, but it gave us the chance to visit one more place before our flight.

Then we spent almost a month in Bali. It wasn’t exactly luxurious, but it was an incredible experience. At the time, it felt absolutely amazing. Now it doesn’t seem quite so spectacular, but back then, just being in a country 7,000 kilometers away from Ukraine was a joy in itself.

In 2015, it happened almost every day. When I joined Azov, the unit had just been withdrawn from Shyrokyne, so I didn’t take part in any active combat operations at that time. We focused more on training and preparation. There were a lot of fun moments, we were more or less free people and could go on vacation to Berdyansk or Mariupol and not just sit in the barracks. In 2022, there were moments like that too. Even in the trenches, there’s always room to laugh and have fun.

During combat, you’re fully focused on what’s happening, you just live in the moment. There’s no space for specific thoughts; all your attention goes to the situation because of the constant danger. But in between, when we pulled back to rest, I’d think about my family, especially my kids. At the time, I didn’t know my second child that well yet, but I still thought about them. It gave me a sense of warmth and the feeling that what I was doing mattered.

Probably the biggest tradition that sets Azov apart from others is reciting the Ukrainian Nationalist Prayer every morning. The 3rd Separate Assault Brigade does that too.

Yes, I just remembered a really emotional, fun moment, also connected to Azov. It was around 2015 or 2016. A football match in Sartana near Mariupol, maybe for the city day. Sartana’s team played against Azov. We had a lot of football fans with us, and they put on a great performance in the stands. It’s one of those memories that still warms me. It ties into your question about songs: there were lots of chants, jokes, and fan songs from that scene.

I first got into the fan section when I was about 14, in Kyiv at a Dynamo match. After that, I went to a few more games that season, and from the next one I had a season ticket and didn’t miss a single home match. From the age of almost 16, I started traveling to away games.

Yeah, we didn’t just wave around with scarves.

Before we went into combat, it was the biggest adrenaline rush we had. I don’t know what else to compare it to. Maybe skydiving. I mean, when you’re completely focused, you’re fully prepared, so you feel different and, basically, you feel less pain. And the result brings a pleasant feeling if it’s a victory. And I was rooting for Dynamo, so there were plenty of victories.

My sense of humor got darker, if it’s at all possible.

After I got into the Invictus team, there were a lot of dark jokes about limbs, or more about the lack thereof. If you joke like that somewhere on the street, you’d be the last bastard. But in this kind of community, you’re allowed to joke like that.

Food. I guess, the feeling of happiness caused by food has mostly changed among those who were in captivity.

But also during my service in Donbas… We were sent to positions and ended up staying there for a week, living in makeshift holes and digging everything ourselves. On day three or four, we were attacked –– it felt like an attack from The Walking Dead, like they were on drugs, we shot them, but they kept going.

After that, we dug in deeper and haven’t left the positions for almost a week. We had brought food for just a couple of days, so we quickly ran out and had to survive on leftover rations from those before us. But once we had settled in, we started taking turns going on trips to the neighboring villages, having delicious meals at the gas station. It was also a ritual that kept us afloat in the trenches: when you know that you’ll go to Toretsk tomorrow and have a delicious shawarma.

After returning, after the injury, I was on a feeding tube for a week. At that time, I really craved good food because of it. And when they first let me eat — even just baby food, without removing the tube — it was a moment of joy. Now enough time has passed that good food no longer brings those intense feelings. It’s just a normal thing again.

The hardest thing probably is seeing people just living their best lives and barely noticing that anything is happening in the country. There may be fewer of them now than after my first return, when some didn’t even realize anything was going on. But what’s especially hard to take is people dodging military enlistment and even bragging about it. When you know some are doing everything to keep the country alive, while others take pride in avoiding that responsibility.

No, the first time it didn't exist at all. It still wasn’t pleasant to feel that some people just didn’t care. Back then, a veteran was often seen as someone who just gets free transportation, like, “why should they?” People thought: you chose to serve, so that’s on you. But you’d remind yourself you didn’t do it for others, you did it for yourself, to be able to live with yourself. Still, it felt bad then, and now it’s even more frustrating because it matters more.

Another hard thing was accepting that you can’t really help much anymore. At times, I wanted to go back and take an active role again, because the war is still going on and you feel like you’re doing nothing. There’s this sense of guilt for not being involved anymore.

Joy isn’t a sign of either strength or weakness. It feels like a different dimension altogether—it has nothing to do with either. It’s just joy. It’s like taste isn’t part of beauty: you can’t say something is beautiful or not just because it’s sweet. Those are different senses. Same here: it’s an emotion that exists on a different plane.

After the Invictus Games, a lot of new opportunities opened up for me, bringing only positive emotions and experiences. It’s not even about taking part or traveling to another continent, it’s the community I joined and the people I met. It feels like a whole new world that the project opened up for me.

If we’re talking about the international event itself, it was about two weeks (maybe a bit more) with the training camp in Canada beforehand. It felt like a plateau of incredibly high emоtions, I was super excited all the time!

Normally emotions go in waves, something good is followed by something bad. But there, everything stayed at a peak almost the entire time. And even after returning, there wasn’t a big emotional drop, but just nostalgia and memories of those moments.

Just being at an event of that level! You just walk into the opening ceremony… We stepped into the stadium… and you’re not actually doing anything, just sitting there, while the ceremony unfolds around you, performers singing. But the atmosphere itself pulls those positive emotions out of you. You’re just sitting there in awe, holding your breath.

The first was after my snowboard run. The course itself felt pretty uneventful, it was beginner level. So, the ride itself wasn’t so emotional, but when I got to the bottom, my teammates told me they’d already seen the results — I was in first place!

From that moment until the last rider finished, it was pure tension. With every person who came down and didn’t beat my time, it felt like another little victory. By the end, it wasn’t just one win—it felt like I’d won several times over.

Probably the best thing about kids is getting to share their emotions. You experience something not through your own feelings, but by watching theirs. You live the moment through your child. When they achieve something, like riding a bike for the first time, you feel that joy as if it were your own. You just watch, feel proud, and share in their happiness.

I don’t, they learn by themselves. You don’t need to teach them how to enjoy life, you just need to enjoy it together with them.

Probably the birth of my child.

The first one, because I was there. My second child was born while I was in Kyiv Oblast, in late March, during the first month of the full-scale invasion. There was too much going on, chaos, the fighting was pulling back from Kyiv, and I had found out that my brother was trapped in Mariupol. So I wasn’t fully present for that moment. That’s why the birth of my first child stands out more.

Oh, actually, that’s another moment for the previous question. It was when I found out my brother had been exchanged. I was at a friend’s birthday when my mom called, crying, saying he was back.

That was an incredibly intense moment. I could barely hold it together; it’s hard to even describe those emotions. It was a mix of overwhelming relief and joy. Probably one of the most emotional moments of my life, maybe even more than the birth of my child.

After the Revolution of Dignity we were going to serve together. The National Guard was undergoing a reform at the time. There were conversations among friends about joining the National Guard, and that it wouldn’t be some “old school police-style thing,” but rather a more or less patriotic way to defend the state. I somehow missed the moment when he went to Basic Military Training, and then he joined Azov in 2014. Every news outlet had been talking about how this is going to end “any minute now”, so I didn’t think it makes sense to join anymore. But that minute never came, so I joined in 2015, when he was resigning. I came in and took over his callsign. In 2021, he came back though.

It means being able to find moments of joy even in difficult situations. For example, a shell lands not in the trench, but a meter away from it.

Or like… Once we were building positions, and it kept raining the whole time. To be more precise, we arrived in the rain, it stopped during the day so we went out digging trenches and fortifications, and then it would start raining again while we were on duty.

You’d come back completely soaked, lie down in your sleeping bag in wet clothes, only taking off your boots because they were covered in mud, and somehow fall asleep. Then you’d wake up and everything was dry. That, too, felt like a kind of joy.

This interview.

Today I laughed because my child tried to blackmail us in the car. She said, “If you don’t give me the phone, I’ll throw a tantrum,” and then just started screaming on purpose. We were just laughing at how fake it all was. At one point we were all in the car: one kid started screaming, the second joined in, then me and my wife joined too — so all four of us were “screaming,” and then I just burst out laughing.

The main thing is not to give in to the demands of “terrorists,” so the blackmail didn’t work. Because if you give in once, it never ends!

A lot of them. Sometimes I even remember being a child, on a swing behind the house, and my dad pushing me on the swing. It’s just one simple moment that for some reason keeps coming back.

Pain. Because if it hurts, it means you're alive.

Adrenaline, some kind of extreme experience. Right now, for example, I really want to get back on a snowboard. I just want to see snow again.

I don’t know. Probably, like mountains. Joy can be versatile.

I don’t know. Maybe, speed. The sense of flight, of velocity — that’s also joy. Movement. I imagine joy as something in motion: snowboarding down a slope, flying, a parachute jump, something like that. Or even just driving fast toward a pole.