DPR commander Mamai killed during filming for Russian TV
The commander of the Pyatnashka battalion, Oleg Mamiyev, was killed by a Ukrainian volunteer with the call sign “Kipish” while being filmed for the Rossiya TV station, journalist Yuriy Butusov reported on his Facebook page.
“Mamiyev personally took the film crew to forward positions in the region of Krutaya Balka near Avdiivka. Mamiyev wanted to show off. He drove the car himself, didn’t wear a helmet, and then it turned out that he wore a bullet proof vest without armor plates, in order to present himself easily and comfortably as a courageous TV hero. You see, Mamiyev knows that TV heroes make careers for themselves best of all – Motorola and Givi were a product of Russian TV propaganda, they were concocted by the Russian propagandists. And Mamiyev wanted to attain the same glory himself, in order to replace the eliminated battalion commanders,” the journalist wrote.
According to Butusov, in order to demonstrate nighttime combat, the militants provoked exchange of file with the Ukrainian forces in the region.
“Payback began to fly at the mercenaries’ positions. This is exactly what Mamiyev wanted to show to Sladkov (the TV journalist for Rossiya) – how the Ukrainians were shooting at him. And so the moment several grenades from an AGS-17 grenade launcher exploded in the trench, Mamiyev took the Russian TV crew there. Wounded Russian video operator Dmitry Vydrin recounted what Mamiyev said: ‘Let’s go, I’ll show you what the AGS did to the trenches. These were his last words. They went three meters, and that was it.’ The wounded sound operator for Rossiya Igor Uklein said: ‘Grenades flew. They detonated at head-height, and got everyone’,” Butusov reported.
The journalist noted that four shots from a grenade launcher are audible in the Russian correspondent’s video clip.
“In order to show the propagandists a fight, he deliberately led the film crew into a Ukrainian grenade launcher’s range. That is, to the place where our grenade guy Kipish had already hit several times! As you can hear on Sladkov’s video clip, four shots of the grenade launcher were heard, and then Kipish prematurely paid off Mamiyev’s mortgage loan. He received penetrating wounds to the head, chest and stomach,” Butusov noted.
DPR field commander Oleg Mamiyev,Mamai, who commanded the Pyatnashka militant battalion, was killed on May 18. Mamiyev came to the Donbas from Ossetia in 2014. He also fought in the Vostok battalion.