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 same atrocities as Bucha and Irpin just to the east, is that Mr. Gudauskas saved the lives of 203 Ukrainians by his own careful count, from the start of the Russian invasion, on Feb. 24, through April 1.

Dubbed the “Angel of Vorzel” by some of those he rescued, Mr. Gudauskas, in his late 30s and with short graying hair, has an unassuming presence. But that is in stark contrast to the powerful stories of resilience, survival, and escape that lie behind the names and details of those he drove to freedom, which he keeps handwritten on pieces of paper stuck to a whiteboard with magnets.

“I was warned many times, ‘If we see you on the horizon again, we will finish with you,’” he says. “But every time I went, I found many people who wanted to leave, people on their knees begging to be taken away. I wasn’t able to not go there again.”

On many levels, Mr. Gudauskas’ story reflects the broader trajectory of Ukraine’s increasingly successful, against-all-odds resistance to Russia’s overwhelming firepower.

Through bravery, resourcefulness, and sheer determination – supported by an ever-widening group of volunteers, who provided humanitarian aid, as well as bread and cigarettes to buy off Russian troops at checkpoints, for example, and to pay for scarce fuel – one man was able to impact hundreds of lives for the better.

An official letter from deputy Alevtina Kovalchuk of the Bucha Regional Council confirms the rescues from the Bucha region, which includes Vorzel, saying Mr. Gudauskas “risked his life” to save 176 people and bring aid, and that the impact “cannot be overestimated” for thousands of residents. One pregnant woman he evacuated even named her newborn son Konstantin. 

Love for “freedom spirit”

Indeed, the success of Mr. Gudauskas’ derring-do was only possible because of a fortuitous combination of three factors. First was his Kazakh passport – and identity cards from his time at university in Russia showing his nationality as “Russian” – that “added up to them trusting me,” he says.

The second factor – which Mr. Gudauskas describes as a “problem in his life” since childhood, causing him to “walk the edge many times” – was fearlessness, no matter the circumstances.

The third was his 15 years as a human rights activist in his native Kazakhstan, where opposition politics brought Mr. Gudauskas under the scrutiny of security services. Up to eight people were detailed to watch him before he left for exile in Ukraine in 2019, he says, and under such pressure he “learned to be calm.”

Mr. Gudauskas was impressed by “moving from a dictatorship” in Kazakhstan to a country where President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appeared to move effortlessly among citizens, and in his 2019 inauguration speech said, “Every one of us is president now.”

“I fell in love with this freedom spirit,” he says. “I understand why Ukrainians fight not just for the four walls of their house, but for this spirit.”

So, soon after Mr. Gudauskas, from his Bucha apartment, directly observed Russian airborne troops in late February arriving at Hostomel Airport, he called a former government adviser and asked what he could do. She told him the Russians were hunting down military families, and some needed rescue. She sent names and photos.

By the third day of the war he had evacuated two families, but then the Tesla he was driving took a direct hit from a Russian rocket. Mr. Gudauskas was knocked unconscious, and taken to Kyiv.

Trapped in Vorzel

During 10 days of recovery, he spotted a Facebook post about the grim circumstances of Ihor Poklad, a prolific music composer who last December was awarded the “Hero of Ukraine” medal by President Zelenskyy.

Mr. Poklad, nearing age 80, and his wife, Svetlana, reportedly were trapped in the basement of their summer home in Vorzel and running out of supplies and hope. Mr. Gudauskas vowed to find them.

Their urgent plight was typical of those in Vorzel needing rescue.

The fighting above ground was so intense that the older couple, from their basement, learned to differentiate between types of rockets and artillery rounds.

The electricity was cut. Then water stopped working, and phone signals weakened. Then, as Russian troops began poking around, house to house, the shooting began.

“When we heard a gun shoot, we knew someone was being killed,” Svetlana Poklad, an elegantly dressed retired teacher of Russian language and literature, recalls in a late April interview in a Kyiv park, still exhibiting signs of stress.

“First they would kill the dogs that barked at them and gave away their position. Then they just started killing people. … You could be shot for anything,” she says with a raspy, still-exhausted voice. The older couple were alone and “desperation started to come.”

“Every night we would hear the column of Russian vehicles being destroyed, and the next morning there would be a new column,” says Ms. Poklad. “There were so many of them, like cockroaches.”

The couple’s moment of clarity came one morning when they tried to make a fire. Avid campers, they usually could light a fire with a single match – but that morning it took more than an hour, because of the stress.

“That’s when we realized that we have to leave, [that] if you stay, you will die,” Ms. Poklad recalls. Their phones were dead, the generator out of fuel, and Mr. Poklad – who previously had undergone two heart surgeries – was finding it “very hard.”

Ms. Poklad found just enough fuel in a camping lantern to fire up the generator, sufficient to charge four phones to 3% or 4% battery strength, then had to step 50 yards outside to find a signal.

“We already had bodies on the street, very many of them,” she says. The Russians “never let us bury those bodies. The same things in Bucha were happening in Vorzel.”

“Like the hand of God”

She found a signal and learned efforts were underway to save the couple. But reality quickly set in.

“With each minute, with each hour, our hope was melting,” she says. “We had such euphoria. But we understood that we were under total occupation, that there was no spot where any Ukrainian could come.”

Then the impossible happened.

“I saw the red jacket, and saw Kostya passing the window,” she says, using Mr. Gudauskas’ nickname. “I was shocked, but did not fear. From the first look, I could tell that I could trust him. … I consider it a miracle, like the hand of God.”

They loaded into the car, with their Labrador dog sitting on Mr. Poklad’s “Hero of Ukraine” medal, to hide it. As they departed, they asked Mr. Gudauskas what they should do. He replied, matter-of-factly, “Pray.”

After their evacuation, the Poklads soon came across another Vorzel couple in distress. Mr. Gudauskas decided to go to the district every day – sometimes twice – to evacuate people unable to escape themselves.

The Poklads helped, with humanitarian aid and finding candidates for evacuation.

“Now, I am sure we have one more family member, and that is Kostya,” says Ms. Poklad. “We owe him our lives.”

Despite Mr. Gudauskas’ unique ability to navigate past Russians, his rescues involved many harrowing moments. The fear of those he took out was at times so severe that “they could not say their names at checkpoints,” he says.

In one case, he was carrying a 7-year-old girl with a severe shrapnel wound, breathing with the help of an oxygen tank. They were held at a Russian checkpoint for an hour and a half, while the girl sat in the back seat.

“You are bringing a Bandera. … Let us kill her,” Mr. Gudauskas says one Russian told him, referring to Stepan Bandera, a World War II-era Ukrainian nationalist who collaborated for a time with Nazi Germany. He replied, “If that were your child, I would go for them, too.”

They arrived safely in Kyiv, the girl unconscious and with just three minutes of oxygen remaining.

“I could not help them”

Other times, the “Angel of Vorzel” was helpless to stop the horror.

“I saw many times people being shot in the head,” Mr. Gudauskas says. He recalls a family that approached a Russian checkpoint from 200 yards away. The teenage boy was shot dead first, then the father. The mother was caught and severely beaten.

“The most scary thing is there was nothing I could do at that moment,” he recalls. “I could not help them.”

He recalls a similar instance, when he took a 20-year-old as a partner to help. They were in two cars. Tears come to Mr. Gudauskas’ eyes as he recounts how Russian soldiers stopped the young man, put a grenade in the hood of his hoodie, and blew him up.

Mr. Gudauskas says he never lost a passenger in his car, but there were many close calls. He says he has cooperated with Ukrainian and European prosecutors as a witness to crimes, and to identify Russian perpetrators.

“There were moments when people asked me to take them, but there was no space in the car,” he says. “Next time I went, they were dead.”

Mr. Gudauskas says he “personally” buried 74 people, and has since helped families and prosecutors to exhume the remains. He is trying to quell talk among locals about naming a Vorzel street after him, or erecting a monument.

“Just let me be an ‘angel,’” says Mr. Gudauskas. “That’s enough.”

Reporting for this story was supported by Oleksandr Naselenko.