Foreigners working with a volunteer corps were reportedly killed in the attack on Kharkov this week
Aftermath of a Russian strike in Kharkov, Ukraine on January 17, 2024. © Pavlo Pakhomenko / NurPhoto via Getty Images
A Russian missile strike on mercenaries in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov killed foreign individuals associated with the so-called Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK) earlier this week, RIA Novosti has reported, citing a representative of a pro-Russian resistance group in Ukraine.
The Russian military said it targeted a “temporary assembly point of foreign fighters” in Kharkov on Tuesday, killing 60 foreign fighters and injuring more than 20 others, the majority of whom were “French mercenaries.”
The claim has been disputed by the Ukrainian side, which has provided multiple conflicting accounts of the incident. While local authorities said the affected site was a disused hospital, regional police claimed it was actually a civilian residential building.
A representative of an anti-Ukrainian resistance group in the city of Nikolayev, Sergey Lebedev, spoke about the strike to RIA Novosti, providing new details. While he could not corroborate the number of the French mercenaries killed in the strike, he claimed that some of the foreigners were associated with the RDK.
“The people [at the destroyed buildings] were foreigners, they were heard speaking French. We don’t know exactly how many French nationals were there at the time of the attack. But there were definitely those who supervise the RDK. They were foreigners,” Lebedev stated.
The RDK is a Ukrainian paramilitary unit associated with the country’s military intelligence, the GUR. The unit, which is known to have multiple neo-Nazis within its ranks, has long been portrayed by Kiev as being composed solely of Russian nationals.
RDK fighters were involved in multiple sabotage raids on Russian territory.
The raids have yielded mixed results at best, with RDK militants managing to kill a few Russian civilians, but sustaining heavy casualties in the process, according to the Russian military.
