The vehicles were seized near the village of Lutuhine, located 18 kilometers from Luhansk. The men carried IDs showing that they are paratroopers of the Pskov division’s airborne brigade No. 74268.
Andriy Lysenko, the spokesman of the National Security and Defense Council said at a briefing on Aug. 21 that it was a “full range of documents – from drivers licenses to military documentation.”
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“There was a personal notebook of Lieutenant Popov, the platoon commander of the guard, among the belongings,” Lysenko said.
The Russian defense ministry slammed the allegations as false.
“This is the 1001th piece of so-called evidence in the entire range of daily exposures of Russian presence on the territory of Ukraine,” Russian Major-General Igor Konashenko told RIA-Novosti, the Russian state news agency.
“Probably the next ‘indisputable fact’ will be a Kalashnikov captured in a ‘fierce fight’ or an F-1 grenade with detailed personal diaries of allegedly Russian soldiers,” he added.
But Roman Bochkala, a journalist of Ukrainian Inter TV channel, showed the footage with papers and a photo of the machine gun marked with the name of Private Surnachov, the passport of Nikolay Krygin, a resident of Russia’s Pskov region, and a journal spelling out names of other soldiers who are probably taking part in hostilities in Ukraine.
There were also drill regulations for paratroopers, combat regulations of the Russian army, and several Russian credit cards captured, according to the photos published by Bochkala.
When the fight finished on Aug. 20, the battlefield had blue berets of paratroopers scattered all around, Bochkala wrote based on his talks to the Ukrainian soldiers who captured the vehicles.
Bochkala also published an anonymous message he received through Facebook, allegedly from the wife of one of the servicemen of Pskov airborne brigade. “Our husbands have been recently sent to Ukraine, allegedly for military exercises. They didn’t know where they were supposed to be sent. There have been neither phone calls, nor any ‘hellos’ since then. We are sitting and crying,” the message said.
“What kind of exercises could there possibly be abroad?” Bochkala said. He said the evidence will be shown to foreign ambassadors and representatives of international organizations.
Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko is scheduled to meet his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Minsk on Aug. 26 along with the leaders of European Union and presidents of Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at grytsenko@kyivpost.com
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