The Russian president awarded the title of Hero of Russia to Andrei Grigoriev for “his courage and heroism”.
Vladimir Putin awarded Russia’s highest decoration to a Russian soldier who, authorities say, killed a Ukrainian soldier during hand-to-hand combat, a further illustration of the extreme violence of the conflict.
The Russian president awarded the title of Hero of Russia to Andrei Grigoriev for “his courage and heroism”, the Kremlin said on Saturday January 11 in a press release, without providing further details.
Russian military bloggers published a video in early January filmed by a GoPro-type camera worn by a Ukrainian soldier.
In the images, this soldier advances towards a house, then an exchange of fire begins and he throws a grenade inside the building. A Russian soldier comes out and the two men begin to fight with their bare hands and knives.
The soldier carrying the camera, who shouts cries for help in Ukrainian, asks his adversary at the end of the video to let him die in peace and says in particular “goodbye, mother”.
Pro-Kremlin media identified the Russian soldier as Andrei Grigoriev, from the Siberian region of Yakutia, populated mainly by Yakuts, a Turkic ethnic group.
On Telegram, the leader of Yakutia claimed to have met the soldier on Saturday, hailing the “feat” of a “very modest” man and saying he had given him a traditional Yakut knife.
“It is these kinds of people who make our great Russia stronger,” assured the leader, Aïssen Nikolaev.
Lured by the promise of big salaries, many men from disadvantaged Russian regions, particularly those with ethnic minorities, went to fight in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian media Suspilne, for its part, identified the soldier killed as a man from the Odessa region, Dmytro Maslovsky, specifying that his death took place in November near the town of Trudové, in the Donetsk region (east). .
According to estimates, the fighting has left several hundred thousand dead and injured since the large-scale attack on the Kremlin in February 2022.
