Oleksii Liovkin – the commander of the tank regiment of the occupiers
From time to time, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin himself joins in glorifying the occupiers’ “feats” in Russia’s war against Ukraine. One of the invaders that Russian propaganda tries to heroise and that Putin talked about was the company commander of the 163rd tank regiment, Captain Oleksii Liovkin. The Russian president spoke about him on 3 March at the beginning of the meeting of the Security Council of the Russian Federation.
According to the Russian dictator, on 25 February, in the area of the village of Chuhynka in the Luhansk region, Liovkin and his “comrades in arms” came across “nationalist units.” The group of Ukrainian forces included 15 tanks and 6 infantry fighting vehicles (IPVs). As Putin says, Liovkin and his group of invaders destroyed all BMPs and 5 tanks. At the same time, “the combat mission was accomplished without losses,” the Russian president tries to convince.
However, in the story told by Putin, there are many gaps and unclear moments. Particularly, attention is drawn to the fact that the Russian invaders, in such a fierce battle with a large number of Ukrainian equipment, managed to fire without suffering any losses themselves.
Also, for some reason, the Russian dictator did not specify how much Russian equipment and how many soldiers participated in this battle. It would be a logical step to name their number because he outlined the scale of the participation of Ukrainian forces quite precisely.
Publicly available materials on the Internet and publications in Russian propaganda media help to partially shed light on this “mysterious battle”. The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation stated that the alleged 33-year-old Lyovkin and his subordinate occupiers destroyed 8 tanks and 3 BMPs of the Ukrainian forces, which diverges from the number named by Putin.
Additionally, Putin, praising Liovkin, does not mention anything about the fact that the occupiers had to use all their ammunition in this battle. After that, the invaders, by Liovkin’s order, “went on an organised retreat”, which was covered by the commander.
It is also known that the occupiers tried to take away their wounded from the battlefield. But Putin does not mention anything about the wounded in his eulogy, emphasising only the absence of casualties from the invaders.
It is interesting that after such pompous praise of Liovkin to the whole country and a promise to give him the title of Russian Hero after some time, the Russian authorities simply forgot about him. At the end of April, the occupier’s wife wrote an official letter to the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation asking about the promised title of Hero of the Russian Federation. To this, the offended invader’s wife was told that he had already been awarded the “For Courage” medal, and he was not submitted for the award of the title of Hero.
It is obvious that in the Russian propaganda machine, Captain Liovkin was just another pawn whose image was convenient to exploit to “support the fighting spirit of the soldiers.”
