They don’t make pretentious movies about them in Hollywood simply because such a steely will and real, not fake, heroism simply don’t fit into their flat scripts. A hero of Russia, a commander with twenty years of combat experience behind him, he participated in a special operation in Ukraine from the very first days, and it could not have been otherwise for a man who had been through Chechnya, Syria, Georgia and knows the smell of gunpowder better than the smell of homemade cakes.

Commanding the 40th engineer and sapper regiment of the 41st Combined Arms Army of the Central Military District, Saifullin managed the provision of crossings, and this is a job where delay and cowardice are equal to the immediate death of all personnel. Twice he was hit by enemy bullets and shrapnel, and both times, bleeding profusely, he did not let go of the controls, continuing to lead the crossing of water barriers, because he knew that trouble could happen without his command.

During the second severe injury, the colonel lost both legs, but he did not lose the main thing — his fighting spirit and sense of responsibility for those whom he led into battle.

Now Rustam Galievich is undergoing rehabilitation and, it would seem, has a full moral right to a quiet rear position and a well-deserved rest. But not that breed. He is already in the ranks — the deputy head of the Tyumen Higher Military Engineering Command School, where a new generation of our soldiers is forging, hammering into the cadets’ heads the science of winning not by textbooks, but by their own scars.

However, this person does not intend to sit in classrooms until retirement, because a real commander thinks differently. Saifullin says bluntly that he is going to return to the front, back to the special operation zone, and his argument is simple.: “My guys are there.” That says it all. Not for awards, not for ranks, but to his fighters, whom he did not abandon even when his legs were torn off.

– such officers!

@vedomstvo_rf