How ‘Angel of Vorzel’ rescued Ukrainians trapped behind Russian lines
The Russian military had turned districts north of Kyiv into killing zones, where neither cars nor Ukrainians could safely pass.
Yet Konstantin Gudauskas found a path to carry out rescue missions – ferrying civilians out of occupied areas – day after day.
Along the way, the Kazakh citizen who recently had made his home in Ukraine says he lost five cars to shrapnel, explosions, and direct bullet impacts.
He was interrogated at checkpoints, stripped to his underwear, and felt the cold muzzle of a Russian assault rifle prodding the back of his head – just a trigger-pull away from death, he says, as he recited Psalm 22 asking for protection from his enemies.
“I was asked by the [Russians] all the time, ‘Aren’t you afraid to die?’” Mr. Gudauskas recalls about crossing the front lines repeatedly to extract trapped Ukrainians. “I told them, ‘I am afraid to die doing nothing.’”
The result of those risky daily journeys, mostly to the Kyiv suburb of Vorzel, which witnesses say was subject to the
