Вікторія Горбік War 14 January 2025, 12:20

"He taught everyone who wanted to move to Poland as much as possible and went to defend Ukraine himself". The story of a blogger who taught Polish and then mobilized into the FPV unit

Mykhailo, with the call sign «Polyak», joined the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in May 2024, and before that he was a Polish language teacher and developed a blog with about 135,000 subscribers. He is currently a soldier of the «Shchedryk» shock company of the 411th separate regiment of unmanned systems «Yastruby».

Polish is almost like the Poles

Mykhailo is a Ukrainian who was born in a small village near Chernobyl. Answering the most frequently asked question of the community earlier, he says that he does not live in Poland, and before the service he lived in Kyiv and Lviv. How did he become a «non-teacher-by-education» of the Polish language?

It all started when, in the summer of 2014, a 20-year-old guy decided to learn Polish, so to speak, «for fun.» Almost a year later, in the spring of 2015, he defended his bachelor’s degree at KPI and was preparing to win free tuition at a university in Wrocław.

In September, Mykhailo announced that he had moved into a Polish dormitory and bought his first Polish beer. After working at a local pizzeria and encountering Polish slang and swearing, he quit his job in February 2016 after a fight with the owner.

«If I didn’t know Polish well, I wouldn’t have argued,» the soldier writes.

But the experience in the pizzeria brought Mykhailo’s language skills to the level of Poles, and he got a job in a clothing store. And his colleagues didn’t even guess that their colleague was Ukrainian until he said it himself.

To teaching and blogging

In 2017, Mykhailo decided to quit his job and studies and return to Ukraine. He settled in Lviv and then decided to monetize his knowledge of Polish. At first, he worked as a freelance translator. And already in the spring of 2018, Mykhailo’s income was $1000-1200 for 4 hours of work per day.

Mykhailo and his wife Olena (Instagram photo)

He worked and traveled in Macedonia and Albania, where he met his girlfriend, who later became his wife. In 2019, Mykhailo finally returned to Ukraine and has lived here ever since.

In September 2020, the young man started his blog, and he really started teaching Polish in 2022.

Were bloggers created before the war?

Until May 2023, Mykhailo was a blogger and Polish language teacher. Together with his team, they created Polish language courses. Periodically, they held various open charity lessons.

He taught people Polish and filmed entertaining and educational content to get people interested in learning Polish in such an unconventional way. In his lessons, he focused on language traps, words that sound similar but have completely opposite meanings, slang, and vulgar vocabulary.

As Mykhailo told in an interview with Maria Berlinska on the Dignitas channel, at a certain point he realized that his time had come and he had to take on this responsibility. He found a unit, went through all the stages of recruiting, BZVP (basic military training), and immediately got to where he had planned.

To Maria’s question, what about the statement that bloggers are not created for war, Mykhailo «Polyak» answers that everyone who has the desire and who has the
understand why you are going there.

The military man agreed with Maria’s words that he had trained as much as possible everyone who wanted to move to Poland and had himself gone to defend Ukraine.

How the blogger was greeted in the Armed Forces of Ukraine

Since Mykhailo was mobilized by a unit that he had chosen through recruiting and knew how the processes inside were organized, he met what he expected there.

In the unit, everyone who is currently performing tasks to defend Ukraine are volunteers who made the decision to independently and voluntarily join the ranks of the armed forces and entered service in 2022, 2023, and 2024.

Mykhailo prepared for service and chose a direction about six months before the planned mobilization: he studied where he wanted to go and chose a direction.

«I realized for myself that the field of UAVs is one where you can constantly learn and develop. And this is a good motivation not to stand still,» the military man noted.

He took various courses, including the «Modern Technologies» course at Victory Drones, which is available to military personnel, and studied information independently using open sources.

Blogger and FPV

Mykhailo says that when he was mobilized, he had no interest in drones and did not want to work with FPV.

«I think when you go into FPV, you have to love it, because unlike other types of drones, FPV requires a lot of hassle, knowledge, and work,» the military man explains.

According to Mikhail, just pulling the drone out of the box and having it fly doesn’t work. The military man himself needs to make a lot of improvements and modify the drone to make it work the way he needs it to.

But it so happened that when Mykhailo already got into the unit, he was assigned to the FPV crew. The blogger underwent internal training within the unit and it was there that he realized that he was really interested in it and that this was a really promising area in UAVs.

After the BZVP, the military were sent for professional training on «Shrike» (a certain type of FPV drone), and later studied at the «Lastivka» school with a different specifics.

«This is a good entry into this field to understand whether you will like it at all,» says Mykhailo.

Later, there was also separate additional training within the unit with experienced specialists.

Currently, together with the FPV crew in «Shchedryk», the soldier is performing tasks to defend Ukraine. Mykhailo has not yet been awarded the military accounting specialty (VOS), but he is waiting for this process, because some of his comrades who arrived at the unit with him have already received the VOS.

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