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Wearing his military fatigues, holding his gun, Yaroslav Amosov spent the past three months guarding the streets of Irpin, Ukraine.
After nearly three decades of living there, memories of his childhood no longer fill his mind when he thinks about home. Neither do dreams of raising his 10-month-old son there. Instead, his final days in the city were spent surrounded by corpses, and he occasionally recognized the faces once filled with life.
“I’ve seen the dead lay on the ground for two, three weeks,” says Amosov, speaking through a translator. “I have seen them cover the ground. No one could give them a burial.”
Those images, now seared in his brain, do not account for the worst of the atrocities he witnessed while protecting Ukraine from Russian soldiers in March amid the Battle of Irpin.
“You hear that the Russians have planned all this strategic bombing,” says Amosov, a highly decorated mixed martial artist. “It is a lie. They bomb whatever they can. Daycares, hospitals, schools. It does not matter to them. Russian soldiers are torturing and killing innocent people.”
Technically termed an invasion, Russia has waged war on Ukraine for more than 100 days. Russia is dehumanizing Ukraine, attacking in every conceivable manner. Thousands of children from Ukraine reportedly have been kidnapped and moved against their will to Russia. Heavy artillery and air power are driving Kremlin forces, and the country keeps reaping wartime benefits–Russia’s fossil fuel income reached just under $100 billion in the war’s first 100 days.
For Amosov, his home is ripped apart.
“I watched a little boy, not even two years old, hold his dead father,” Amosov says. “He was too young to know how to react. I can still see that boy. He was frozen. He could not even cry.”
Amosov, 28, is the reigning Bellator welterweight champion. Winning all 26 times he has entered the cage, Amosov last competed in last June, when he beat Douglas Lima by unanimous decision to win the belt.
Buoyed with optimism, his MMA future was overflowing with big fights and life-altering paydays. He never envisioned his next fight would be a style of urban warfare eerily reminiscent of the second World War.
“Until this, I had never touched a weapon before,” Amosov says. “There were other ways to deal with problems than with weapons, so I never touched them. But I wanted to protect my home, so you do what you have to do.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin deployed troops across Ukraine on Feb. 24 in pursuit of reclaiming the sovereign nation. Evoking the spirit of Peter the Great, a Russian czar obsessed with expanding the country by any means necessary (and whose birthday–350 years after he was born—was celebrated just over a week ago in St. Petersburg and Moscow), Putin has focused on expansion by controlling smaller towns and villages in eastern Ukraine, including key city Severodonetsk, where savage street fighting has proved successful for Russia.
As cities and territories fall, overwhelmed by massive Russian manpower, the attack on Ukrainian soil is a sobering reminder of just how little civilization has evolved.
“I want it to go back to the way it was,” Amosov says. “I want to see people smile.
“I want young men back home to care about sports. Not war. The well-being of the country and the people, that’s what is important to me.”
Once Russia invaded Ukraine, Amosov could have opted to leave the country to train, like with his MMA gym—American Top Team in Florida—yet he opted to stay. During the Battle of Irpin, Amosov and his fellow troops defended their home turf, removing the enemy troops. But there is no victory in war. With each passing battle, humanity suffers.
In the backdrop of Ukrainian troops carrying the banner and defending their land stands a grim reality. That is the unmistakable destruction of their land, with civilians caught in the crossfire and a rising river of mothers’ tears weeping over their lost.
“I’m not proud of war,” Amosov says. “But this is something I had to do.”
With Irpin currently secure, Amosov has relocated to Germany to sort out visa issues for his family. Conducting this interview on Zoom in a subway station, Amosov expressed an honest vulnerability about his MMA future.
“I never thought of myself as a special person because I’m a fighter,” Amosov says. “I wanted to protect my country. All I think about is my home. That is most important for me.”
In Amosov’s absence from Bellator, there was an interim welterweight title bout last month, where Logan Storley won the temporary belt. Storley (14–1) is an impressive fighter, especially with his skill as a wrestler—and the only blemish on his record was suffered in a loss to Amosov nearly a year and a half ago. There will be a title unification fight when—or, perhaps, if—Amosov returns to the cage.
“I don’t know if I’ll fight again,” Amosov says. “Or if I can train the same way. We’ll see. That does not matter now. Maybe I will watch [the Storley-Page fight] soon. It is not what fills my mind. Right now, everything is upside down.”
Dripping with emotion, Amosov spoke for 20 minutes, occasionally moving to different locations inside the subway. He smiled in the few moments when he held his son. Then reality inevitably set back in, and he again became flooded with despair, thinking about those who will never again hold their beloved.
“War means broken lives,” Amosov says. “That is war.”
In a small amount of time, Amasov learned more than he ever desired about war and its hellacious tendencies.
Youthful exuberance has been replaced by the war’s harsh realities. The sound of school children no longer fills the air each day in Ukraine, replaced by the harrowing, silent screams of desperation. The dead are strewn where the living used to roam. A “strategic victory” has reasserted itself back into the vernacular, a diplomatic way to describe beheadings, sexual abuse and the burning of those souls whose time on earth ended in a living hell.
“I want to go back to the way it was,” Amosov says. “It is hard to speak about. There are no words left to describe it.”
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Justin Barrasso can be reached at JBarrasso@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinBarrasso.
