Volunteer Communist Detachment: They gave their lives for their comrades

February 9: On February 8, 2015, the Volunteer Communist Detachment (DKO) of the Ghost Brigade suffered its most severe one-time loss. During an operation to rescue wounded members of a reconnaissance team, three DKO soldiers were killed: history teacher from St. Petersburg, Eugene “Taimyr” Pavlenko; Donetsk journalist, historian and poet, Vsevolod “Stipa” Petrovsky; and squad medic, Sergey “Senya” Kornev.

Eugene took this photograph on his camera, just a few hours before their loss:

Yesterday Seva Petrovsky’s parents managed to come from the United States to visit the scene of our guys’ death. There, among the fragments of trees mutilated by shrapnel, lay the remains of the “Bumblebee” carrying Seva and the “pencil” (grenade) from Eugene’s RPG-7. We removed hazardous residues for recycling, but the perfectly preserved “pencil” with the inscription “For Taimyr!” from our scouts was delivered to its “recipients” the same evening, albeit with a delay of a year, but to the right place. 

Death in war is always blind, it does not divide its prey based on talent or fame, and its does not care whose life is cut short – a poet, a teacher or an ordinary father. But death has no power over memory, and as long as we remember our fallen — they stay with us.

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Translated by Greg Butterfield