Meet a Canadian medic escaping Russian artillery strikes and saving lives on Ukraine's front lines
CBC
As he raced in his Land Rover to help families flee a Russian onslaught near Bakhmut, Ukraine, Brandon Mitchell of Miramichi, N.B., escaped death twice in a single day.
It was last August and Russian troops were closing in on the nearby Donbas town of Soledar, which at the time was still under Ukrainian control. Artillery strikes were intensifying and families wanted to leave in a hurry.
But as Mitchell and his partner raced through what had, in effect, become a Russian artillery alley, a shell whizzed through the air and hit just a few metres in front of his speeding car.
Swerving to avoid the crater without stopping, he finished his mission and brought everyone in the house to safety.
"We got seven people out that night, including a baby," recalled Mitchell.
But the evening would bring yet more drama. Mitchell was returning to make another evacuation run when suddenly an enormous explosion engulfed his car.
He was lucky — the vehicle absorbed most of the blast but it still shattered his eardrums and left him concussed.
"I drove over two anti-personnel mines," Mitchell told CBC News. "I ruptured my right tympanic membrane — my eardrum — and I'm told I have a traumatic brain injury."
Mitchell's medical and evacuation work was paused as he recovered and contemplated his scrapes with possible death.
"I've struggled with it," he told CBC News in the town of Kostyantynivka, not far from Bakhmut, which has been under constant attack and bombardment from Russian forces.
As our team spoke to him, the cracks and detonations of incoming and outgoing artillery shelling were constant and intense enough to set off car alarms.
But even with his injuries and close calls, Mitchell says the war in Ukraine has now become too personal for him to leave.
"I've had several friends that were personal friends who've died now in this war. So this is now my war," he said.
Mitchell says was raised by an aunt in Miramichi after his mother died when he was young. He joined the Canadian military reserves and served at CFB Gagetown before moving to the United Kingdom and joining the military there.
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