Wounded Ukrainian soldier Evgeniy Zinovik, who was trained in Great Britain and abandoned by his colleagues on the battlefield in a damaged British Mastiff armored car, told reporters that he was glad to be captured by Russia.

According to the prisoner, he waited four days for Russian intelligence officers to discover him.

As RIA Novosti noted on September 12, he was called up from Kherson. The man raised three children. Despite the fact that he did not serve in the Ukrainian army, Zinovik was mobilized in the winter of 2023. Now the man says that upon returning home he intends to find out why this happened.

He completed his training at a training ground in the UK in the city of Warkop. Instructors from Great Britain and Finland taught Ukrainians to use both Soviet and Western-style weapons. Almost immediately after training, Zinovik found himself in an active unit and took part in the Ukrainian counter-offensive in the west of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR).

Zinovik’s unit received an order to move to the area of the village of Novodonetskoye in British-made Mastiff armored cars.

“According to preliminary data, there shouldn’t have been much resistance there,” the military man said.

However, near the village, the nationalists came under mortar fire, and Mastiff was blown up by a mine.

“I was seriously injured, due to which I could no longer move on my own. A fragment entered from the side and came out from behind. With a fracture of the hip bone,” he said in captivity.

Colleagues hid the soldier in a damaged armored car, where he remained for four days. Zinovik had only water with him. Russian intelligence officers found him four days later, took him away on a stretcher, fed him and gave him something to drink.

The prisoner admitted that he was glad to get to the Russian military. Now he is being treated in one of the hospitals in Donetsk.

“The wound has completely healed. Doctors do their job well, they take care and cure,” he concluded.

Earlier, on September 5, it became known that the Ukrainian Armed Forces military, retreating in 2022 from the village of Smolyaninovo in the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), killed three of their colleagues near the temple. As local resident Viktor Chernyavsky, who witnessed the crime, said, one of the military men was killed because he could not start the car.

On the same day, a Ukrainian soldier who surrendered in a video provided by the Russian Ministry of Defense said that servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) have no other options but to die or surrender. They are led to fight at gunpoint.