“The gunpowder gets under your skin. The adrenalin is excellent, full of uncertainty, like sex in the wild,” says Stevan Milosevic, a Serb fighting for pro-Russian forces in the disputed region of Donbass in eastern Ukraine.
Milosevic, who is in his 30s, told BIRN in an interview conducted via Facebook that his working day as a sniper starts at around 6am with coffee and breakfast. After that, he is taken to his sniper position, which he sometimes has to hold for days.
His targets are Ukrainian soldiers in eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region. More than 10,000 people – civilians and fighters – have so far been killed in the conflict between Ukraine and separatist, pro-Russia fighters who refuse to recognise the Ukrainian government and in 2014 seized territory in eastern Ukraine.
Milosevic defends his actions by claiming Ukraine has not respected the Minsk agreements, signed by Kiev and Moscow in 2014 and 2015, which were supposed to ensure a ceasefire in eastern Ukraine. Fighting has continued with both sides rejecting blame for the failure of the ceasefire.
“They [Ukrainian fighters] are constantly using heavy weapons and shelling our positions, as well as villages inhabited by citizens and civilians,” he claims.
Milosevic is one of 29 Serbs convicted by Serbian courts since 2015 for fighting with pro-Russian units in Ukraine. Another 16 Serbs accused of fighting in Ukraine are currently awaiting trial. All those convicted agreed to plea deals that have, for most, resulted in suspended sentences of around one year. Three offenders were sentenced to six months under house arrest.
The prison terms have been suspended on condition those convicted do not commit the same offence within a set time period – usually between one and five years.
This hasn’t deterred Milosevic, who received a five-year suspended sentence in 2015, from returning to the battlefields of eastern Ukraine. He says he returned to Ukraine in August 2018 and is currently fighting for the Prizrak Unit, which is part of the International Brigade. Prizrak is the Russian word for ‘ghost’.
Partially redacted verdicts
In 2014, Serbia passed a law prohibiting citizens from fighting on foreign battlefields with military and paramilitary formations, unless part of an official mission of an international organisation of which Serbia is a member. Penalties range from six months to five years in jail.
Documents from Belgrade’s Higher Court obtained by BIRN after it submitted a freedom of information request show Serb fighters joined eight pro-Russian units. The papers also reveal hitherto unknown details of Serb fighters’ movements and actions, including combat, operations to secure military facilities and counter-intelligence tasks.
The documents list the following units Serbs fought with: the International Brigade, the Seventh Brigade, the Serbian-Hussar Regiment, the Ural Unit, the Batman Unit, the First Slavic Unit, the Rezanj Unit and also the notorious Wagner group.
While the court documents detail which units Serbian fighters joined and describe how Serbs participated in the conflict, a number of the names of those convicted and some details about how they were organised have been blacked out from all court papers, including the verdicts. This information would normally be made public.
It is also unclear how the fighters were arrested and whether they surrendered to the Serbian authorities.
The Higher Court said it had withheld names because of “personal data protection laws”.
Most Serb fighters joined the International Brigade, also known as ‘Pyatnashka’, which, according to its official Vkontakte social media account, is fighting in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine. The International Brigade
According to the court documents, nine convicted Serbs, including Milosevic, who were fighting for pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine were part of this unit.
The papers also mention Nikola Perovic as one of the people who trained Serbian fighters for the International Brigade. The court papers do not specify whether he is among the convicted.
In a 2014 report published by the French newspaper Le Monde, Perovic is described as French-Serbian and is quoted as saying: “We will very soon leave for eastern Ukraine to fight alongside our Russian brothers”.
The International Brigade claims to have been first formed by 15 “volunteers from Russia” but soon more people joined.
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