Nikolai Shishkin was 19 when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union.

In 1940, after finishing school, he was called up for military service. He graduated from aviation school and was assigned to a fighter aviation regiment in Kyiv just a month before the war began.

The 103-year-old veteran remembers the first day of the war very vividly.

“It was a day off,” Shishkin recalls.

“Everyone was partying and having fun. Then at six o’clock, the division commander flew in and said that at four o’clock the Germans had bombed Kyiv. That’s how the war began.”

He initially served as a motor mechanic in a fighter regiment, and later flew bombers as a flight mechanic.

The first Soviet fighter jets, the I-16s, were small and maneuverable but slower than their German counterparts, Shishkin says.

“Even the German bomber Ju-87 had a higher speed than this fighter,” the veteran explains. "They started to prepare to the war earlier, while our (government) was looking for "enemies of the people" in its own country."

At the beginning of the war, Kyiv was surrounded by German troops.

Shishkin, along with other Soviet soldiers, tried to escape the encirclement but was wounded.

A local villager who cared for the wounded soldier passed him off as one of her own children during a Nazi raid, as he looked very young at the time.

Now, all his relatives know her name—Hanna Natalushko—the woman who saved his life.

Wartime was difficult, Shishkin says, but he never stopped believing in victory.

"When the victory happened, what celebrations started! With tears, songs, dancing and everything. Let's say, there were two friends: the husband of the one who didn't come back (from the war), while (the husband of) the other who did come home.

"It is clear that one was rejoicing and the other was crying. So that's why indeed we say, the victory with tears in the eyes."