A Russian soldier’s attempt at filming his tips on how to survive the war in Ukraine was brought to an abrupt end when he was hit in apparent Ukrainian shelling.
The video, shared on Telegram by Ukrainian journalist Yuriy Butusov, shows the soldier walking alone in an undisclosed location.
Before he was apparently hit, he said that he received a key tip that has helped him carry out offensives in Ukraine unharmed.
WILL VASSILOPOULOS/AFP/Getty Images
“We’re leaving the mission. We’ve been carrying out a combat mission for several days, now we’re stomping home. This is the **** weather in this **** country…today is December 1, the first day of winter. We’re at war,” the Russian soldier said.
“As my first company commander said when I was still a cadet at the famous General V.F. Margelov Ryazan Guards Higher Airborne twice Red Banner Order of Suvorov Command School…in order to survive in the war…,” the soldier said, before he is struck and lets out a scream.
It isn’t clear if the strike came from Ukraine. Newsweek couldn’t immediately verify when or where the video was filmed, and has contacted Russia’s Defense Ministry via email for comment.
“The secret of the survival of the occupying paratrooper on Ukrainian soil remains unsolved,” wrote Butusov in a post accompanying the footage. “Although in fact the unspoken recipe was simple—stay in Ryazan and everything will not be so fatal.”
Butusov was referring to the location of the military educational institute in Ryazan, about 120 miles southeast of Moscow, where the soldier said he trained. The school was formed in 1918, and it is the official military academy and advanced training center of the Russian Airborne Forces.
More than 60 Russian soldiers were killed or wounded by an artillery strike from their own military, Newsweek reported in September.
Yuriy Mysiagin, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, said in a September 10 post on Telegram that Russian soldiers in Optyne, a village in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, were “retreating to new positions chaotically and almost in a panic” when other Russian forces mistook them for Ukrainian troops. As a result, a drone operator reportedly ordered an artillery strike on them.
“The result was 27 dead and 34 wounded. Approximately half of the wounded had their arms or legs blown off and several pieces of equipment were lost,” Mysiagin said.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.