Last Friday signaled the end of an era in the life of Ukrainian Civil Defense military rescuers: the central emergencies and rescue unit of the Civil Protection Service of Ukraine’s Ministry for Emergencies held a ceremony to bid farewell to the unit’s colors and the Soviet defense ministry’s flag “For Courage and Military Gallantry.”
This was a special event for all the servicemen in the unit. Under the state-sponsored program of converting the Civil Defense Troops of Ukraine and the State Fire-Fighting Service into a single civil protection relief-and-rescue service, as of Jan. 1, 2006, all military units subordinated to Ukraine’s Ministry for Emergencies were re-formed as civil protection emergency-and-rescue detachments: in other words, they ceased to be military units.
Veterans and current rescuers assembled on the parade ground of the Civil Defense Troops Unit D- 0040. While old soldiers exchanged greetings on Defender of the Native Land Day, government representatives handed out several dozen awards and citations for meritorious service to the Fatherland. As the ceremony drew to a close after a farewell to the colors, veterans and guests were shown the latest achievements in civil protection: state-of-the-art mine disposal equipment, chemical defense and fire-fighting techniques, new approaches to locating and rescuing people trapped under wreckage.
The veterans had much to reminisce about. The 6th Engineering Chemical Defense Regiment of the Air Defense Troops was formed in 1943. More than 400 of its officers and men were awarded the medal “For Defending Stalingrad.” The central emergency-and-rescue unit’s grounds are studded with billboards announcing “Regimental Comrades-in-Arms,” “The Unit’s Combat Road,” “The Site of a Feat — Chornobyl,” describing dozens of heroic exploits by these servicemen. The soldiers of this regiment executed a great number of exploits in the 68 years since the war: in 1944 they erected a bridge over the Dnipro; in 1961 they arrived at the scene of the tragic mud slide in Kyiv’s Kurenivka; and they were among the first to arrive at the disaster-stricken Chornobyl nuclear power plant. In honor of this and for rescue operations during the floods in Transcarpathia, devastating storms in Ternopil and Zhytomyr oblasts, and explosions in Bila Tserkva, the unit was awarded the Order of the Red Banner (1968) and the USSR Ministry of Defense flag “For Courage and Military Gallantry” (1986). Another commemorative flag and the honorary title of “Kyiv” were conferred on the D-0040 Civil Defense Unit in 1968.
A military flag is the symbol of a military unit. As long as there is a flag, the military unit exists even if it has just one serviceman, while the loss of the flag entails disbandment of the unit. In this case it is the reverse: the unit has been disbanded, but the colors, flags and other insignia will occupy a place of honor in the repositories of the Museum of the Great Patriotic War.
