The violence of the fighting marked on the body. With an arm and a finger missing, Dimitry Finashin was a soldier in the Ukrainian National Guard before he was seriously injured on the front lines of the conflict against Russia. He bears witness to his daily life at the front.
“That’s my ex, my ex arm,” says Dimitry Finashin, showing a photo of him on his forehead on his smartphone.
Despite the severity of his injuries, the former soldier never lost his sense of humor. A Ukrainian fighter, the 28-year-old was first a drone pilot, before becoming a sniper and nearly dying during a mission.
Drone pilot in charge of monitoring Russian tanks
On his mobile phone, Dimitry Finashin scrolls through photos of himself in military uniform, in devastated urban landscapes, memories of his activity as a soldier in the Kyiv forces.
At the time, “(his) job was to fly a drone to tell (the) guys what was going on,” he says.
Their mission is then to block the Russian tanks advancing in numbers to the west of the Ukraine. Despite the violence of the conflict, he affirms: “from an emotional point of view, it was actually very happy. Emotions overflow.”
It even goes further. “You’re not afraid, you just want to burn them,” she says with a smile.
“I said to myself: ‘come all the way here to die like this'”
After being a drone pilot, the soldier becomes a sniper. During a mission, he takes three bullets, including two to his left arm and one to his right hand.
“I told Socrates (another soldier), take my phone out of your pocket, call my wife. Tell her that I had promised her that she would come back, but that I will not come back here, ”she recalls.
Dimitry loses consciousness. When he wakes up, he has already lost a lot of blood. “I said to myself: ‘Damn, come here to die like this,’” he worries.
“I am in the rear bases, the orcs (Russian soldiers editor’s note) will be able to find me and take a picture of me. disappeared and will wait for years imagining that I am a prisoner somewhere, ”he imagines.
After two days of suffering crawling through the mud, the soldier is finally found by another Ukrainian regiment. It is the end of the nightmare. His left arm, gangrenous, must be amputated, as well as one of the fingers of his right hand. He now awaits a long convalescence with his family, far from the trenches.
Source: BFM TV
