Deceased, who was returned by Russian-led forces on July 17, is a military medic from Estonia – DNA test
The results of DNA examination showed that the body of the soldier, who was recently transferred by Russian-led forces to the territory controlled by the Ukrainian government, belongs to the deceased military medic, Estonian citizen Nikolai Ilyin, according to the Joint Forces Operation (JFO) Facebook page on Monday.
"The deceased sergeant Nikolai Ilyin really was an Estonian citizen, served in a unit of the Armed Forces of Ukraine legally ... The Joint Forces Command expresses its sincere condolences to the relatives, friends and fighting brothers of the deceased hero," the message says.
Farewell to the medic will take place in Kyiv on July 22.
As reported, on July 13, Russian-led forces fired at a group of Ukrainian soldiers who were evacuating the body of a Ukrainian army soldier near the village of Zaitseve. As a result of enemy fire, a military medic was killed, one soldier was wounded, and another was injured in combat.
The bodies of the dead and the wounded soldier remained at the site of the shelling. Negotiations began with the OSCE SMM on their evacuation. On July 15, the body of a serviceman who died on July 13 near Zaitseve was returned from the temporarily occupied territory.
Later it became known that the military medic who died in Donbas was an Estonian citizen.
On July 17, Russian-led forces handed over an unidentified body to Ukraine from the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine in Donbas, but there was no confirmation that it was a military medic who was killed near Zaitseve on July 13, so it was sent for DNA examination.
On the same day, Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Reinsalu confirmed that the Estonian citizen had died as a result of military operations in Donbas on Monday, July 13. He came to Estonia in 2006 as a scholar within the framework of a project and had a refugee status, and in 2016 he received Estonian citizenship through naturalization, renouncing Belarusian citizenship.
The Prosecutor's Office of Donetsk region has begun a pretrial investigation into the violation of laws and customs of war, combined with premeditated murder, by Russian-led unlawful forces.
