Sgt. 1st Class Vitaly Skipakevich, 21: Commando lived with no regrets

Sgt. First Class Vitaly Skipakevich, 21, a soldier in the Commando Brigade’s Egoz unit, from Ariel, was killed on October 7 while battling the Hamas invasion of Kibbutz Kissufim.

The morning of the attack, Vitaly and his comrades were stationed in Huwara in the West Bank, which had been the site of significant unrest in the prior weeks and months. They were sent down south to join the fighting there, and he called his parents to tell them to stay inside and lock their doors.

He was sent to Kibbutz Kissufim with his battalion and they entered in order to rescue residents and battle the Hamas gunmen inside. Inside one house, they were ambushed by a gunmen and Vitaly was seriously wounded but continued fighting. His family said he was brought elsewhere in the kibbutz for treatment and Vitaly demanded that others who seemed more hurt be treated first; he ultimately died of his wounds that evening in Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba.

He was buried on October 13 in Barkan. He is survived by his parents, Ruslan and Elena and his sister, Amalia.

Born in Russia, Vitaly and his family moved to Israel when he was a baby, settling in the West Bank settlement of Ariel. Growing up he always dreamed of a meaningful military service, and he attended the Naval Officers Boarding School in Acre for high school.

After graduating, he went through the application process for the elite Shayetet 13 naval commando unit, and ultimately wasn’t accepted, something he took hard. But when he was selected for the Egoz reconnaissance unit he was thrilled, enlisting in December 2020, throwing himself into the role, training as a sharpshooter and taking part in many missions.

His family and friends set up an overlook point in his memory in Ariel in a spot where Vitaly loved to sit and think about things. With the end of his mandatory service coming up, his family said he had began to plan his future, lining up a trip to Thailand and Vietnam and promising that after his return he wanted to run a marathon.

His uncle, Vitaly Karant, told a Kan radio station that his nephew “was a kid with a lot of charm, an endless smile, a kid who should be right now on the beaches of Thailand, on a trip he’d been dreaming about for two years.”

On his way down south that day, his uncle said, Vitaly wrote a sort-of goodbye letter to his family and friends, envisioning in some way his fate: “My life was really good and I wouldn’t change anything in it, the path was always correct, even if others saw it as a mistake, I did everything my own way and enjoyed and learned from my mistakes,” he wrote, hours before he was killed. “I had a really unique life and I enjoyed every day in my life. Thank you to everyone and I hope you will remember me positively.”

Vitaly’s best friend, Shaked Ben Shlush, wrote on Instagram that it was hard to comprehend that “you’re not with me Vitaly, you’re not with me my brother. You’re somewhere up above, dying of laughter that I actually stood by the vow we took at age 18 when we enlisted,” that if one of us was killed in the line of duty, the other would show up to their funeral wearing fairy wings.

“Yes, I did what you asked of me,” he wrote. “You’re so much more than a brother to me, you’re a part of me, a part of me has died and stopped functioning. We have a shared tattoo that will remind me of you always every time I look at it… You’re the family I chose for myself.”

Elena, his mother, wrote on Facebook about how they always celebrated the Russian festival of Novy God together as a family, “and even when Vitaly was in studies far from home he always convinced his teachers that he had to be home for this holiday… He always had presents under the tree — it didn’t matter what gift was waiting for him, he was always happy when he opened the package. He is missed so much by us! We love him so much in a way that cannot be described in words.”

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