one of his comrades in arms recounts the assault of Wagner’s troops

The video of the execution of this Ukrainian soldier by Russian troops, posted on the internet, has become a new symbol of the alleged war crimes committed in the country. After taking the time, finding different witnesses, here is the story of the last hours of the new hero of Ukraine. The special correspondents of Radio France in Ukraine, Thibault Lefèvre and Eric Audra, helped by Yachar Fazylov, collected the testimony of a soldier who fought alongside him.

Andrïï Homoliako, mObilized since the beginning of the war, is a staff sergeant in the 163^e defense battalionUkrainian territorial nse. On December 29, he is sent to the front of the city of Soledar, in the Donbass. IThe next day, he is in combat, in a trench, alongside Oleksandr Matsiyevski. A few hours later, the latter is captured by the Russians. “We were preparing trenches. Two hours later, the Russians attacked on the left flank, where we had 20 soldiers, including Oleksandr Matsiyevski’s section, says Andrïï Homoliako. His mission with four comrades was to hold the left flank of this trench, where Wagner’s soldiers attacked. Their objective was to get as close as possible and throw the grenades massively. Where Oleksandr was, they came closer to a distance of 20 or 30 meters. They threw their grenades. After 20 minutes of intense fighting, one of the five guys called for help, his legs were mutilated. We moved towards them under the fire of the automatic weapons and the permanent explosions of shells. We didn’t succeed so we withdrew, and that’s when we noticed the absence of five soldiers.”

“His face was riddled with bullets”

On January 8, the battalion left the Soledar front. Three weeks later, during an exchange of about fifty bodies of soldiers with the Russians, the corpse of Oleksandr Matsiyevsky returned to the Ukrainian army. He is then identified by his family, then buried in mid-February in the cemetery of Nidjine, north of Kyiv.

“During the ceremony, I was next to his mother. We talked a lot, she told me about her son, says Andrïï Homoliako again. I asked her in what state she had seen her son’s body. She told me she recognized his body but his face was riddled with bullets, so mutilated that only half of his skull remained. But she recognized him by the size of his limbs, his build, his moles and his scars.”

VSThe information is confirmed byr Oleksandr Matsiyevsky’s mother, who preferred to decline our interview request, byhe mayor of Nidjine who knew the family well and the commander of the soldier’s unit: ten days before his disappearance, he gave her a badge whom he recognized on the video.