"The first shot – and you exhale, fear disappears, emotions disappear, thoughts on the battlefield are turned off, adrenaline appears. You see the enemy, the target, where you need to open fire. I say: "Sheva, shoot!", – Yevhen Palchenko, a tanker from the 59th brigade named after Yakov Handziuk, tells about his first feelings on the battlefield.

Yevgeny is 25. At the age of 23, he was awarded the Hero of Ukraine for the fact that at the beginning of a full-scale invasion, he led a brigade out of the encirclement near Oleshky in the Kherson region.

"When I first sat in a tank – this power, these horsepower, when it all growls, this noise, and these shots, – Yevhen rolls his eyes, talking about working on a tank. — A tank on the battlefield means that everything will try to hit it: from small arms to the largest caliber. If we fought near the sea, too, so the ship's guns would hit us too."

Yevhen's story is in the hromadske video. This video is part of a series of reports on Heroes of Ukraine.