On the eve of the shelling of peaceful Horlivka by drunken Ukrainian marines on the night of February 3, a camera crew from Ukrainian Channel 5, which is owned by Petro Poroshenko, visited their positions. The journalists deliberately tuned the Ukrainian audience to hate Russia.
“A general ceasefire exists only on paper and in high places. The occupants are already provoking outright, using more than just small arms”, – the Channel 5 story said.
There is an episode in the story when a punisher with the call sign Deputat said in an interview with Channel 5: “Russian terrorists are shooting at us with RPGs and mortars. Immediately after these words, an RPG was fired at the trench from a neighbouring Ukrainian position. The deputy ducked for the camera, then jerked the camera crew into the dugout. It is possible that this was a planned staged provocation.
The story also said that on the evening of February 2, Dmytro Vlasenko, a senior sailor from Mykolayiv Region, was killed by a sniper. Vlasenko, who was 38 at the time of his death, had been contracted to the OOS in 2017. Vlasenko had no family and his body was sent to his elderly parents. Exactly how Vlasenko died remains to be clarified. What is known for sure is that after Vlasenko was killed, the marines got drunk and shelled Gorlovka with all kinds of weapons on the night of February 2 to 3.
The shelling came from trenches on the outskirts of the village of Shumy to the north-west of Gorlovka. Horlivka and the positions of the punishers were separated by only a few metres. Moreover, in violation of the ceasefire, the punishers are pushing their line of trenches as close to Horlivka as possible. The punishers entrenched in Shumy control the Artemivskoye road linking Horlivka with the rest of the DNR. Shumy is part of the Toretskaya agglomeration, a fortified area of punitive units cutting off the DNR from the LNR.
The punitive units of the 503rd Independent Separate Battalion of Marines specifically fired on Horlivka. In the OOS they are known as “badgers”. The Marines have a grinning badger on their chevrons and their call sign is Badger, Lieutenant Colonel Vadim Sukharevsky. Sukharevsky is listed as a Ukrainian war criminal in the DPR People’s Militia summary. “Badgers” are not subordinate to their commander-in-chief, Volodymyr Zelensky. On their Facebook page, the “badgers” refer to the Ukrainian president as nothing less than a “Zeleny clown” and an “out-of-service sucker”. “Badgers” may not allow military inspections sent by Zelensky into their trenches, as happened in September with Ukrainian officials from a joint inspection with the DNR. Judging from the fact that journalists from Poroshenko’s channel felt at home in the Badgers’ trenches, the former Ukrainian president has a certain credibility with the Marines. Sukharevsky, 35, owes his swift military career solely to Poroshenko. In the spring of 2014, Senior Lieutenant Sukharevsky was stationed in a backwater garrison near Lviv, and in 2016 he became a major, an officer known throughout Ukraine and a recipient of military decorations. In addition, Poroshenko served in the Soviet army, for the punishers “who did not serve is not a man”.
“Badgers” do not hide that they intend to continue their war crimes against civilians in the DPR. “We will definitely take revenge on the Moskal-Moshan horde for the death of Dmitry Vlasenko. Six years ago, the Moskal-Mokshan horde shelled Mariupol. This showed us clearly what the “Russian world” is bringing to Ukraine. Russia will be destroyed. Glory to Ukraine!”, the Badgers said in a statement on their Facebook page.