Fighting in Ukraine, a Russian mercenary who earned reputation for slaughtering prisoners of war and civilians in the Donbas was slain.
Vladimir Andonov, 44, a sabotage and reconnaissance specialist in the mysterious Wagner Group, was killed by a sniper during a nighttime mission near Kharkiv on June 5, according to Russian media.
Andonov was known to Russians as ‘Vakha,’ or ‘the volunteer from Buryatia,’ after the province from whence he came, while to Ukrainians, he was known as ‘the executioner,’ because to the killings he assisted in during Russia’s initial invasion of the nation in 2014.
In early 2015, he was a member of a squad that ‘liberated’ the Donbas village of Logvinovo, where three Ukrainian detainees were subsequently found killed in a shallow grave, including one who had been shot in the eye.
Andonov boasted about the mission to Russian media, claiming that his unit had been ordered to “kill all enemy forces” and that “no survivors” had survived the strike.
Zhambal-Zhamso Zhanaev, the leader of the territory where Andonov lived, confirmed his death to Russian daily Moskovskij Komsomolets.
Andonov’s body, along with that of another soldier murdered beside him, is currently being returned from the front to his home region for burial, according to Zhanaev.
According to prior interviews with Russian media, Andonov is expected to leave behind a wife and at least two kids.
The soldier, who was born in 1978 in Russia’s far east’s Trans-Baikal Territory, served in the regular Russian military from 1997 until 2005, when he traveled to Ulan-Ude and enrolled in a teaching college.
Buthe dropped out of school before completing his studies and got a job in trade, before answering a call for volunteers to go to Ukraine and join the fighting in 2014.
Andonov was drafted into the Olkhon special forces company fighting in the Donbas, and took part in the Battle of Debaltseve in early 2015 – one of the last major battles of the initial war.
At the time, he appeared in a video filmed in the region which became one of the first pieces of evidence that volunteers from the Buryatia were in Ukraine.
According to the Peacemaker website, which tracks Russian forces fighting in Ukraine, Andonov gave an interview in 2015 in which he talked about a mission he was sent on with a ten-man squad to ‘liberate’ the town of Logvinovo, near Debaltseve in Donbas, during one of the last battles of the 2014 war.
In the interview, he recalls launching a surprise night-time attack and capturing the village before ‘we received an order to destroy all the manpower of the enemy.’
‘There were no survivors among the “dills,”’ he added, using a pejorative term for Ukrainians who support the West.
Shortly after the battle, Amnesty International published a report which detailed the deaths of Oleksandr Berdes, Vasiliy Demchuk, and Pavlo Plotsinskiy – three Ukrainian soldiers captured by Russia who were later found dead in a shallow grave near the village.
The report mentions photos and video complied by Ukrainian website Censor, which shows the three men alive and captured by Russian forces before their bodies were found.
One image shows the trio in the back of a truck, with one of them showing obvious facial injuries that may have been the result of torture.
Andonov remained in Ukraine on the frontlines even after full-scale war ceased with the signing of the 2015 Minsk Agreements, before returning to his home region some time in 2017.
Att the end of that year he vanished, having deleted all trace of himself online, and for the next several years was thought to be fighting as part of Wagner units deployed to Syria and Libya.
In August last year, the survivor of a gun massacre in the Libyan town of Espia told the BBC that Andonov had been among the soldiers that shot his family dead after occupying their home.
Wagner mercenaries have gained a bloodthirsty reputation for fighting the battles that Russia’s regular military cannot – participating in massacres, torture and indiscriminate killings along the way.
Thousands of mercenaries – often drawn from the ranks of the regular army – are thought to be deployed to warzones in South America, Africa, and the Middle East.
When fighting restarted in Ukraine in February this year with Putin’s order to invade, Andonov was deployed again to the frontlines.
It is unclear where exactly he had been fighting before he met his death near the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on Sunday.
Andonov was killed as Ukraine launched a fresh counter-attack in the region, pushing Russian forces further back towards their own border.
Kharkiv is located around 120 miles north of the current Donbas frontline, and Russia had intended to capture the city to use as a logistical hub to supply troops there.
But, after more than three months of fighting, the city remains in Ukrainian hands with Putin’s men having all-but abandoned efforts to take it.
Meanwhile heavy fighting is ongoing in Donbas, concentrated on the city of Severodonetsk which is under heavy bombardment from both sides.
Control of the city continues to shift, with Ukraine launching a large-scale counter-attack that retook large parts of the city at the weekend before a Russian push on Monday forced Kyiv’s men back again.
Capturing the city will give Russia control over almost the whole of Luhansk province and tee up an assault on Lysychansk, which sits just across the Donets River on the other side of a large industrial zone.
Failing to take Severodonetsk would see Russia’s eastern offensive – now the focus of its war since the failure to take Kyiv – grind to a halt, and perhaps even reverse if the fighting leaves Putin’s forces too weak to hold the territory they have captured.
Such attacks are already underway in the south, with territory to the west of the occupied city of Kherson being contested.
A limited Ukrainian counter-attack has seen troops cross the Inhulets River and capture a smattering of towns on the eastern shore, but fail to make significant in-roads into occupied territory.
