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Civilians after an attack in Odessa
Photo: Igor Tkachenko / EPA
According to a media report, a German fighter was killed in a Russian artillery attack in eastern Ukraine.
The 37-year-old worked with a drone reconnaissance unit from a shelter that took a direct hit on Thursday and then collapsed.
This was reported by the newspapers of the editorial network Germany (RND), citing the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine.
This is an association of volunteer fighters from abroad.
"When we managed to dig him out, he was already dead," the RND newspapers quoted the International Legion as saying.
The fighter, known only by his first name Stefan, was “a real hero.”
The Foreign Office said on Friday that the ministry was "aware of reports about a German who may have been killed in combat operations in Ukraine."
The German embassy in the Ukrainian capital Kiev is “trying to clarify the matter.”
According to its own information, the editorial network Germany spoke to the Germans a little over a year ago in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
At this meeting, Stefan stated that he had been in the Bundeswehr for five years and had been deployed to Afghanistan three times and that he had a trucking company in southern Germany.
In April 2022 he went to Ukraine and has not been back to Germany since then.
His parents, he reported at the time, were not enthusiastic about the mission, but his friends understood him.
"After your time in the military, you don't have many civilian friends anymore anyway," he told the RND.
Because of a Russian bounty on his head, Stefan didn't want to see any further information about himself in the newspaper.
At the time of the interview he was a group leader of a reconnaissance troop in a special unit of the International Legion.
mfh/AFP