An eighteen-year-old rifle battalion led by a general was blocking the bridge from Hostomel to Kyiv, perhaps the only likely place for a Russian breakthrough. On February 25, 2022, the students took on their first battle with the enemy's subversive reconnaissance group, not knowing the real number of enemy forces and equipment, the cadets resisted Russian attempts to find weaknesses in the defense for almost a month.

Just like more than a hundred years ago, the cadets of the military school repeated the feat of their peers, the defenders of Kruty, who in February 1918 delayed the Bolshevik offensive on the Ukrainian capital.