“Maxim is 20 years old: four concussions, injuries, ‘Azovstal,’ and captivity.” The story of a family whose three sons stood up to defend Ukraine
Source: Novynarnia
Author: Nadiya Zinchenko
In this war, there are entire families whose stories are worth telling. Because, without exaggeration, everyone there is a hero.
“Novynarnia” spoke with one such family from the Sumy region—a mother, her middle son, and her daughter-in-law.
“But we’re just an ordinary family!” says the mother, Olga Anatoliivna Ruden, surprised by the journalists’ curiosity. “We just live close to the border with Russia.”
“But all three of your sons are fighting!
”
“Right now, our middle son, Artem, is awaiting an important—his fifth—surgery. He can’t fight. Artem has a closed spinal cord injury. A disc in his spine has ruptured, and he has a metal plate in place. We’re waiting for him to receive an American neurostimulator. The device will alleviate the pain and burning sensation in his legs. It costs 740,000 hryvnias. We’ve only raised 100…
– Is anyone helping with the funds?
– They promised to help through my husband’s workplace… The word has spread throughout the district and the region.
– So, tell us everything from the beginning: your oldest son went to war in 2014, then your middle son…
– No, – Olga corrects her, – it all started with the middle one. He was the first to go to war.
Artem – the middle son
A 32-year-old man rolls into the kitchen of their rented apartment in the capital in a wheelchair, accompanied by his young wife, Margarita. Artem looks calm and quiet; his hand reaches for a pack of cigarettes on the windowsill.
When the Revolution of Dignity began in Kyiv in 2013, he went to Maidan.
He convinced his parents that he was leaving to find work: “Don’t worry, I’m fine!”
Artem was on the Maidan from start to finish. And when the Russian aggression began, he simply headed east from there. His parents didn’t know where their middle son was until their eldest son, Serhiy, received a call from the military registration and enlistment office. That evening, he invited his parents to his place. There, his parents met Artem… in uniform. He had been granted a 24-hour leave from his unit.
Artem first went to the 33rd training ground, “Desna.” He underwent three weeks of training there, and by the fourth week, he was already at Donetsk Airport. He fought near Pisky, the Donetsk Airport, and the “Butivka” mine.
Artem was assigned to a reconnaissance and sabotage group. It was the first separate tactical group named after Captain Volovyk of the “Right Sector” Volunteer Corps. In 2016, Dmytro “Da Vinci” Kotsyubailo arrived, and half of the volunteers united under his command. Currently, both groups are fighting as part of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Artem Ruden served as a volunteer in the ATO until the end of 2016. When asked about his motivation, he is genuinely surprised and even raises his voice:
“Well, how could I not? It started in the east, and then it would have spread to Sumy and Kharkiv… I went so it wouldn’t get any closer to home, to my parents.”
He was also wounded during the ATO: a tank hit their vehicle. Artem suffered severe burns—on his hands and face. After several surgeries and rehabilitation, he began working in construction. He and his then-fiancée were living in the capital and planning to buy their own home.
On February 24, 2022, Artem was scheduled to hand over a construction project in Kyiv—an important event for him at the time. He even declined to go with his girlfriend to Chernihiv to celebrate her friend’s birthday.
But that morning, Margarita called and said that the war had begun. Chernihiv, according to rumors, was already closed to incoming and outgoing traffic, but Artem took the risk.
He drove his wife through fields and dirt roads to her parents’ home in the Kryukivsky District. As for himself, he began looking for a way to return to the war. One military registration office was closed, and the police told him to wait. So he decided to head to Sumy. He got lost along the way and ran into some Buryats.
Artem was alone in the car and thought it was all over. The Russian soldiers ordered him to show his papers and asked where he was going. Fortunately, one of them noticed Artem had money, and another saw his cigarettes.
After a few minutes of negotiation, they went their separate ways; Artem was left 2,000 hryvnias and a partial pack of cigarettes lighter. As for the Buryats, they never made it anywhere—the bridge near Malye Ustye had been blown up, so the uninvited guests turned their tanks around.
It wasn’t until March 6 that Artem learned via Facebook that a military recruitment office had opened in Meni—and he rushed over there. He was enlisted.
Early in the morning on March 8, Margarita’s birthday, Artem—now a soldier in the Armed Forces of Ukraine—was deployed to Chernihiv. He was assigned to one of the hottest defensive positions in Chernihiv—“Klever.” Journalists would later write that true “Spartans” were defending this position.
After completing his mission, Artem returned on April 4 to Sosnytsia in the Kryukiv District—where he guarded the village. Next on Artem’s military itinerary was the Dnipropetrovsk region, in Cherkasy. Here, he spent a month and a half undergoing training as part of the 54th Brigade. Artem and Margarita also got married. Friends and comrades congratulated the newlyweds via video call. Then, for the second time in his life, he found himself in the Donetsk region—in Maryinka.
On July 14, 2022, the Russians struck the vehicle Artem was in. The blast threw him out of the car. He regained consciousness in Dnipro, at the Mechnikov Hospital.
Serhiy—the eldest
In peacetime, he worked as a driver for a construction company. He did not serve in the army at the time because of health issues. However, in 2014, Serhiy joined the 79th Airborne Assault Brigade. He fought in Mariupol and served on the Donetsk front. After serving for two years, he returned home. He worked until the full-scale war began.
Serhiy told his parents on February 25, 2022, that he was joining the Territorial Defense Forces to defend his native Sumy region. Later, he expressed his surprise and told his mother that the Russians had sent “children” to fight against Ukraine.
He met his wife during the war—she joined his brigade last year. His daughter, Yesenia, is almost five months old. On October 15, Serhiy came home on leave to have his daughter baptized. He is currently serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, defending the Sumy region’s borders against the Russians.
His plan is to keep fighting as long as the war lasts. And then—to live and raise his daughter.
Maksym: He was 11
when his brothers fought in the ATO When his older brothers were gaining combat experience in the ATO, Maksym was 11 years old. When the military commissariat called, the youngest said he had no intention of hiding: he would serve, just like all normal men. In November 2021, he enlisted for mandatory military service. He was assigned to Mariupol.
On April 10, 2022, Maksym was at his position with his comrades, lying near someone’s house—when he suddenly spotted a tank. He rolled behind a fence—and just at that moment, a shot rang out. His comrades shouted:
“Rudy! Rudy! Are you alive?
”
“Yeah, I’m alive,” replied the youngest of the Rudny brothers. “But my arm was torn off.”
Fortunately, his arm was still attached, but a piece of shrapnel had shattered his shoulder bone. Then his comrades drove up and repelled the Russian attack. The young man was taken to a hospital, where the medics “patched him up”—they stitched and bandaged the wound.
Maksym was one of the conscripts who were taken prisoner after leaving “Azovstal.”
He was first held in Olenivka, then transferred to Taganrog (Russia), and from there transported to the Volgograd region. In Russia, all prisoners of war were called “Azov soldiers” and were often interrogated by being struck in the face with rubber slippers. These beatings caused his face to swell.
Or they would put a plastic bag over the prisoner’s head and submerge his head in water. This form of torture was called “The Diver.”
On October 29, 2022, Maksym was exchanged along with 51 other prisoners of war. When he and the rest of his comrades were being transported for the exchange, the Russians tried to convince them that Ukraine no longer existed and that they were all being taken to be executed.
Maksym Rudny is 20 years old. He has suffered four concussions and other injuries. He is currently serving in the National Guard in Sumy.
Parents
On February 24, 2022, the eldest son was packing his things and preparing to join the territorial defense forces. The middle son, Artem, called his mother, Olga Anatoliivna, because he wanted to ask her advice on where he should go first: to Sumy to be with his parents or to Chernihiv to be with his wife.
The youngest, Maksym, called and begged his parents to pack their things and leave, “because Russian tanks have already reached you.” His mother replied that she and his father weren’t going anywhere. As for the tanks—well, she could see for herself that they were coming.
Her husband—Mykola Hryhorovych, an electrician—commuted to work for a few days while transportation was still running.
Then his wife noticed that he was sitting in front of the TV, which was on, with the phone in his hands. Her husband, who was already thin, stopped eating and speaking.
Olga Anatoliivna also couldn’t cope during the first days of the war. Her sister advised her to take up knitting, but it didn’t help—she always ended up with a tangled mess.
One day, the woman went to the store for bread and overheard fellow villagers talking about preparing food for the territorial defense forces. The idea seemed like a good one to her. At night, with the windows tightly shut, Olga Anatolyevna would wake up and prepare soups and porridges, and bake pastries for three hundred people: “We sacrificed all our chickens for this, and all the money we’d saved up to repair the house.”
Eventually, some of the neighbors joined the Rudnivs, including Olga’s sister and her husband. She also enlisted her own husband’s help—sometimes to assist with other tasks, sometimes to take her place at the stove.
This is how they prepared meals for the Territorial Defense Forces from early March through the end of May 2022. Mykola Hryhorovych began to eat and talk.
A Traitor in the Village
I ask whether there are any traitors in the village of Stetskivka, where the Rudnis live. Because after the tragedy in Hroha in the Kharkiv region, writing about such a patriotic family seems like a huge responsibility.
“Lenka!” Olga, Artem, and Margarita exclaim in unison. “Our neighbor in the vegetable garden. She came from Russia a long time ago and lived among us; she opened two stores.” We found out from the news on TV that she worked for the FSB.
“I would never have suspected her!” admits Olga Anatolyevna. “She always seemed so kind—always smiling.”
“She has three sons, too.” We were in the same class with them,” adds Artem. “They say she set up a network of informants.”
“When the SBU agents detained her,” the man lit another cigarette, “she shouted, ‘You won’t be able to pin this on all of us!…’”
Author: Nadiya Zinchenko
In this war, there are entire families whose stories are worth telling. Because, without exaggeration, everyone there is a hero.
“Novynarnia” spoke with one such family from the Sumy region—a mother, her middle son, and her daughter-in-law.
“But we’re just an ordinary family!” says the mother, Olga Anatoliivna Ruden, surprised by the journalists’ curiosity. “We just live close to the border with Russia.”
“But all three of your sons are fighting!
”
“Right now, our middle son, Artem, is awaiting an important—his fifth—surgery. He can’t fight. Artem has a closed spinal cord injury. A disc in his spine has ruptured, and he has a metal plate in place. We’re waiting for him to receive an American neurostimulator. The device will alleviate the pain and burning sensation in his legs. It costs 740,000 hryvnias. We’ve only raised 100…
– Is anyone helping with the funds?
– They promised to help through my husband’s workplace… The word has spread throughout the district and the region.
– So, tell us everything from the beginning: your oldest son went to war in 2014, then your middle son…
– No, – Olga corrects her, – it all started with the middle one. He was the first to go to war.
Artem – the middle son
A 32-year-old man rolls into the kitchen of their rented apartment in the capital in a wheelchair, accompanied by his young wife, Margarita. Artem looks calm and quiet; his hand reaches for a pack of cigarettes on the windowsill.
When the Revolution of Dignity began in Kyiv in 2013, he went to Maidan.
He convinced his parents that he was leaving to find work: “Don’t worry, I’m fine!”
Artem was on the Maidan from start to finish. And when the Russian aggression began, he simply headed east from there. His parents didn’t know where their middle son was until their eldest son, Serhiy, received a call from the military registration and enlistment office. That evening, he invited his parents to his place. There, his parents met Artem… in uniform. He had been granted a 24-hour leave from his unit.
Artem first went to the 33rd training ground, “Desna.” He underwent three weeks of training there, and by the fourth week, he was already at Donetsk Airport. He fought near Pisky, the Donetsk Airport, and the “Butivka” mine.
Artem was assigned to a reconnaissance and sabotage group. It was the first separate tactical group named after Captain Volovyk of the “Right Sector” Volunteer Corps. In 2016, Dmytro “Da Vinci” Kotsyubailo arrived, and half of the volunteers united under his command. Currently, both groups are fighting as part of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Artem Ruden served as a volunteer in the ATO until the end of 2016. When asked about his motivation, he is genuinely surprised and even raises his voice:
“Well, how could I not? It started in the east, and then it would have spread to Sumy and Kharkiv… I went so it wouldn’t get any closer to home, to my parents.”
He was also wounded during the ATO: a tank hit their vehicle. Artem suffered severe burns—on his hands and face. After several surgeries and rehabilitation, he began working in construction. He and his then-fiancée were living in the capital and planning to buy their own home.
On February 24, 2022, Artem was scheduled to hand over a construction project in Kyiv—an important event for him at the time. He even declined to go with his girlfriend to Chernihiv to celebrate her friend’s birthday.
But that morning, Margarita called and said that the war had begun. Chernihiv, according to rumors, was already closed to incoming and outgoing traffic, but Artem took the risk.
He drove his wife through fields and dirt roads to her parents’ home in the Kryukivsky District. As for himself, he began looking for a way to return to the war. One military registration office was closed, and the police told him to wait. So he decided to head to Sumy. He got lost along the way and ran into some Buryats.
Artem was alone in the car and thought it was all over. The Russian soldiers ordered him to show his papers and asked where he was going. Fortunately, one of them noticed Artem had money, and another saw his cigarettes.
After a few minutes of negotiation, they went their separate ways; Artem was left 2,000 hryvnias and a partial pack of cigarettes lighter. As for the Buryats, they never made it anywhere—the bridge near Malye Ustye had been blown up, so the uninvited guests turned their tanks around.
It wasn’t until March 6 that Artem learned via Facebook that a military recruitment office had opened in Meni—and he rushed over there. He was enlisted.
Early in the morning on March 8, Margarita’s birthday, Artem—now a soldier in the Armed Forces of Ukraine—was deployed to Chernihiv. He was assigned to one of the hottest defensive positions in Chernihiv—“Klever.” Journalists would later write that true “Spartans” were defending this position.
After completing his mission, Artem returned on April 4 to Sosnytsia in the Kryukiv District—where he guarded the village. Next on Artem’s military itinerary was the Dnipropetrovsk region, in Cherkasy. Here, he spent a month and a half undergoing training as part of the 54th Brigade. Artem and Margarita also got married. Friends and comrades congratulated the newlyweds via video call. Then, for the second time in his life, he found himself in the Donetsk region—in Maryinka.
On July 14, 2022, the Russians struck the vehicle Artem was in. The blast threw him out of the car. He regained consciousness in Dnipro, at the Mechnikov Hospital.
Serhiy—the eldest
In peacetime, he worked as a driver for a construction company. He did not serve in the army at the time because of health issues. However, in 2014, Serhiy joined the 79th Airborne Assault Brigade. He fought in Mariupol and served on the Donetsk front. After serving for two years, he returned home. He worked until the full-scale war began.
Serhiy told his parents on February 25, 2022, that he was joining the Territorial Defense Forces to defend his native Sumy region. Later, he expressed his surprise and told his mother that the Russians had sent “children” to fight against Ukraine.
He met his wife during the war—she joined his brigade last year. His daughter, Yesenia, is almost five months old. On October 15, Serhiy came home on leave to have his daughter baptized. He is currently serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, defending the Sumy region’s borders against the Russians.
His plan is to keep fighting as long as the war lasts. And then—to live and raise his daughter.
Maksym: He was 11
when his brothers fought in the ATO When his older brothers were gaining combat experience in the ATO, Maksym was 11 years old. When the military commissariat called, the youngest said he had no intention of hiding: he would serve, just like all normal men. In November 2021, he enlisted for mandatory military service. He was assigned to Mariupol.
On April 10, 2022, Maksym was at his position with his comrades, lying near someone’s house—when he suddenly spotted a tank. He rolled behind a fence—and just at that moment, a shot rang out. His comrades shouted:
“Rudy! Rudy! Are you alive?
”
“Yeah, I’m alive,” replied the youngest of the Rudny brothers. “But my arm was torn off.”
Fortunately, his arm was still attached, but a piece of shrapnel had shattered his shoulder bone. Then his comrades drove up and repelled the Russian attack. The young man was taken to a hospital, where the medics “patched him up”—they stitched and bandaged the wound.
Maksym was one of the conscripts who were taken prisoner after leaving “Azovstal.”
He was first held in Olenivka, then transferred to Taganrog (Russia), and from there transported to the Volgograd region. In Russia, all prisoners of war were called “Azov soldiers” and were often interrogated by being struck in the face with rubber slippers. These beatings caused his face to swell.
Or they would put a plastic bag over the prisoner’s head and submerge his head in water. This form of torture was called “The Diver.”
On October 29, 2022, Maksym was exchanged along with 51 other prisoners of war. When he and the rest of his comrades were being transported for the exchange, the Russians tried to convince them that Ukraine no longer existed and that they were all being taken to be executed.
Maksym Rudny is 20 years old. He has suffered four concussions and other injuries. He is currently serving in the National Guard in Sumy.
Parents
On February 24, 2022, the eldest son was packing his things and preparing to join the territorial defense forces. The middle son, Artem, called his mother, Olga Anatoliivna, because he wanted to ask her advice on where he should go first: to Sumy to be with his parents or to Chernihiv to be with his wife.
The youngest, Maksym, called and begged his parents to pack their things and leave, “because Russian tanks have already reached you.” His mother replied that she and his father weren’t going anywhere. As for the tanks—well, she could see for herself that they were coming.
Her husband—Mykola Hryhorovych, an electrician—commuted to work for a few days while transportation was still running.
Then his wife noticed that he was sitting in front of the TV, which was on, with the phone in his hands. Her husband, who was already thin, stopped eating and speaking.
Olga Anatoliivna also couldn’t cope during the first days of the war. Her sister advised her to take up knitting, but it didn’t help—she always ended up with a tangled mess.
One day, the woman went to the store for bread and overheard fellow villagers talking about preparing food for the territorial defense forces. The idea seemed like a good one to her. At night, with the windows tightly shut, Olga Anatolyevna would wake up and prepare soups and porridges, and bake pastries for three hundred people: “We sacrificed all our chickens for this, and all the money we’d saved up to repair the house.”
Eventually, some of the neighbors joined the Rudnivs, including Olga’s sister and her husband. She also enlisted her own husband’s help—sometimes to assist with other tasks, sometimes to take her place at the stove.
This is how they prepared meals for the Territorial Defense Forces from early March through the end of May 2022. Mykola Hryhorovych began to eat and talk.
A Traitor in the Village
I ask whether there are any traitors in the village of Stetskivka, where the Rudnis live. Because after the tragedy in Hroha in the Kharkiv region, writing about such a patriotic family seems like a huge responsibility.
“Lenka!” Olga, Artem, and Margarita exclaim in unison. “Our neighbor in the vegetable garden. She came from Russia a long time ago and lived among us; she opened two stores.” We found out from the news on TV that she worked for the FSB.
“I would never have suspected her!” admits Olga Anatolyevna. “She always seemed so kind—always smiling.”
“She has three sons, too.” We were in the same class with them,” adds Artem. “They say she set up a network of informants.”
“When the SBU agents detained her,” the man lit another cigarette, “she shouted, ‘You won’t be able to pin this on all of us!…’”
This is an automatic translation generated by DeepL.