‘A bag and a gun, and it was into the tank’
A Russian soldier talks about being wounded near Debaltseve Photo: Baz Ratner / Reuters / Scanpix Dhorzhi Batomunkuev, a tank operator in the Russian military, was admitted to a hospital in Donetsk with serious burns to his face and hands. Batomunkuev, a Buryat from Siberia, was fighting on the side of the separatists in eastern Ukraine, when a Ukrainian artillery shell struck his tank. Twenty-years-old, he came to Ukraine as a contracted soldier in the Russian Army.