‘Have you been through the filtration camp.’”Ī commander appeared and called someone on a radio. ‘Where are you going? Where have you come from,’ they asked. They had seen me and two of them came towards me. “As I left the town there was a checkpoint: Chechens. He knew the only way out towards Zaporizhzhia was through the town. Pedin slept on the couch that night, waking at 6am. He told me, ‘I want to die – I will kill myself.’” He found the grave, and Russian soldiers said he would have to dig him up with his hands if he wanted the body. After he had disappeared he spent weeks looking for him in Mariupol. “He told me that Russians had killed his 16-year-old son on 3 March in Mariupol. He had two shots of vodka, while his new friend emptied the bottle. Pedin gave up drinking 15 years ago but he could not refuse. He said, ‘Young man would you like to drink with me. By the time he reached the first houses, it was getting dark and very cold. His aim was the town of Nikolske, 20km away. “I was an invisible man then,” he recalls. He crouched down, taking Zhu-Zhu, terrified, into his coat, until they passed. He walked by burnt-out military vehicles, just his dog and the noise of shelling behind him until a convoy of armoured vehicles, so heavy they made the asphalt under his feet tremble, swept past. I looked back down at the city and I said to myself, it was the right decision. I walked out of the city by this motorway and at the top I turned around. I was dirty and covered from dust, as my house had been filled with a fog of smoke. “I looked like a vagabond to them, I was nothing. He stole by the crowds, avoiding eye contact with the soldiers, and walked up Zaporizhzhia Road. Russian soldiers were handing out food and water at the end of long queues of desperate ashen-faced people.

He left his home on Tkochenko-Petrenko street near Mariupol’s port at 6am on 23 April and it took two hours to stumble through the craters, twisted steel and unexploded ordnance, north up Kyprino Street, where dead bodies were strewn, and on to the Port City shopping mall. The initial task for Pedin and Zhu-Zhu was to traverse the five kilometres to the city outskirts, an aim that he had little faith could be achieved. He packed a bag, weighed it and challenged himself to reduce the initial 70-kilo weight to 50.

There was already little left to stay for there was scant food or water, the dead were piling up in the streets. Pedin’s final decision to leave Mariupol was made on 20 April, he recalls, when the Russian soldiers had reached his part of the city and were going house to house, shooting at will. He may not have been invisible, Pedin repeats, the tears welling in a rare moment of emotion. Indeed, such would be his extraordinary feat that on one remarkable night Russian soldiers at one of the many checkpoints he would pass through gathered in the quiet of the evening to hear his story, stuffing cigarettes into his pockets for the onward journey and wishing him luck.

Ivisible man getting bur ed