engaged in the special forces, the Ukrainian director, Sakharov 2018 Prix, estimates that it will take “at least two to three years to release all the Ukrainian territories”.
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Serein, determined, Oleg Sentsov turns, over the war, into a real soldier. These days, he patrols in the “gray zone”, as he calls it, regions of Bakhmout and Lyssytchansk, within a unit whose mission is to shoot down enemy helicopters. “They fly at very low altitude. So when a helicopter appears above the trees, says Sentsov, we only have two, three seconds maximum to shoot a rocket.”
Oleg Sentsov, the Ukrainian filmmaker who was an icon of the “Dignity Revolution” of Maidan then, for five years, one of the most famous political prisoners in Russia by Vladimir Putin, Sakharov 2018 prize, s ‘is hired on February 24 in territorial defense, this army of volunteers who joined the Ukrainian forces in the face of the aggression of Russia. Found by Le Monde, after two weeks of conflict, near a checkpoint in the kyiv region, the world-renowned artist gives this time, after four months of war, go to Kramatorsk, in the province of Donetsk. Sentsov left territorial defense, “too boring to [his] taste”, to join the special forces.
From the first days of war, the filmmaker and Ukrainian activist from Crimea had demonstrated signs of impatience to go into battle. After a week to hold a checkpoint, Sentsov, 45, however without previous military experience, had become deputy commander of the unit commanded by Colonel Arkadich, and had joined a mobile group of territorial defense which traversed the first line head -on Around kyiv, then priority target of a Russian army which finally failed to conquer the Ukrainian capital.
“Maximum specialties”
Oleg Sentsov now travels the first lines of Donbass with Stinger missiles. His unit of special forces travels crossed front fronts and sometimes infiltrates the no man’s land between Ukrainian and Russian lines to carry out recognition missions and try to “trap a helicopter”. The artist takes the war very seriously: he returns from a training course, in the west of the country, to the shot of anti-tank rockets Stunned and Javelin. “To war, to be useful, he notes, we must acquire a maximum of specialties.”
Like many Ukrainian fighters encountered since the February 24 invasion, and unanimously since the end of the Battle of kyiv and the first Russian military failure, Oleg Sentsov is part of a long war logic. “The only question is” to be or not to be “[to be or not to be]. It is a war for the survival of Ukraine,” he said in March. “I hate predictions, but I think it will take at least two to three years to release all Ukrainian territories,” he comments today in Kramatorsk.
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