The Decathlete Who Picked Up a Gun

On a rest day from the war in Ukraine, Volodymyr Androshchuk went out for sushi. In a cheap car, recently purchased, he drove his squad leader to a supermarket a short distance from the eastern front. They ate at a safe house and shared a small bottle of Cognac.

“We were so happy, it was crazy,” said the squad leader, Volodymyr Dziubynsky.

But later that night, Jan. 24, 2023, Androshchuk sounded worried over the phone, his girlfriend and his sister said. He and Dziubynsky were members of Ukraine’s elite 95th Air Assault Brigade. The next day’s mission against Russian forces, he confided in encrypted conversations, would be carried out in terrain with no trees and almost no place for cover.

At 22, Androshchuk was not yet of draft age, which was then 27. He had trained as a sportsman, not a soldier, competing in the decathlon, a gantlet of 10 running, jumping and throwing events. He set out to represent Ukraine in the 2024 Olympics in Paris or the 2028 Games in Los Angeles.

Androshchuk, second from left, with a gold medal on the podium at the national junior athletics championships in Lutsk, Ukraine in 2019.Credit…via Liudmyla Androshchuk

“It was his dream,” said Oleksiy Kasyanov, 38, the general secretary of Ukraine’s track and field federation and formerly its national decathlon coach.

By the time Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, however, injuries had mostly sidelined Androshchuk. So he volunteered to represent his country wearing the camouflage of a battlefield unit, no longer in the blue and yellow of a national sports uniform.