Serhii Tabala - Know Your Own

A trainee pastry cook from Sumy went to the Maidan at 17, and at 18 he was defending the control tower of Donetsk airport. Serhii Tabala, a “Right Sector” volunteer with the call sign “Sievier”, was killed there in November 2014. Hero of Ukraine, posthumously, 2016.

From the pastry kitchen to the barricades

Serhii Tabala was training to be a cook and pastry chef when the Maidan protests began in Kyiv in the autumn of 2013. He was 17, and he went there from the very first days.

Serhii was born on 16 December 1995 in Lebedyn, in the Sumy region, and went to school in Sumy. After nine years at School No. 9 he enrolled at a vocational college in Sumy to train as a cook and pastry chef. At around 16 he decided to speak only Ukrainian: when friends laughed at his mix of Ukrainian and russian, Serhii gave his word that he and his children would speak only their native language. On 29 November 2013, on Kyiv’s Independence Square, he joined “Right Sector”, later led one of its squads, and stayed on the barricades of the Revolution of Dignity through the days of February 2014. His comrades on the Maidan were struck by his perfect Ukrainian, and they jokingly called him “the lecturer”: after the clashes they would ask him for a “lecture”, and Serhii would tell them about physics and genetics.

“Sievier” at the airport

After the Maidan, in summer 2014, Serhii went through training at a “Right Sector” camp. At first he was not sent to the front: “You don’t qualify by age.” In the end he headed east on his own as a volunteer of the 5th Battalion of the Ukrainian Volunteer Corps. His call sign was “Sievier” - “North”. On 28 August he was wounded during an assault on the positions at Donetsk airport; he did not want to leave his comrades and went for treatment only on his commander’s order. Once he had recovered, he went back to the airport. Another volunteer from the same battalion, Sviatoslav Horbenko, also fought there.

Serhii Tabala was killed on 6 November 2014 defending the control tower of Donetsk airport. He was 18.

Why it matters today

Serhii Tabala was 17 when he took his place on the Maidan barricades and 18 when he defended Donetsk airport. He showed that taking responsibility for your country doesn’t have to wait until you’re grown up, and that standing by your comrades matters more than your own safety. The decree that posthumously made him a Hero of Ukraine honours both of his choices: the Maidan and the front. His photo at Donetsk airport became the model for a monument to Ukrainian volunteers in Sviatopetrivske, Kyiv region, and Serhii himself appears on a postage stamp and in Artur Orlionov’s painting “Becoming of a Nation”. Anyone who thinks they are too young to make a difference can remember the trainee pastry cook from Sumy.