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She was known as Vladimir Putin’s “Lady Death” and confessed that she “liked to shoot Ukrainians.” Colonel Olga Kachura diedthe first female member of a senior Russian force to lose her life in Ukraine, after a missile attack on the Donetsk town of Horlivka.
Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for the attack, but Russia claims the shot came from Ukrainian troops. According to the Telegraph, Russian President Vladimir Putin has already signed a decree on Thursday granting Olga Kachura the title of Heroine of Russia, the highest posthumous military decoration, in honor of the “his courage and heroism in the performance of his military duty.”
Olga Kachura died while driving in Horlivka. The 52-year-old woman was head of the artillery and rocket division of the self-proclaimed pro-Russian People’s Republic of Donetsk. He had been a policeman for most of his life and in 2014, when Russia launched an offensive in eastern Ukraine, he decided to join a battalion to fight kyiv’s forces.
“I like to shoot Ukrainians”, Olga Kachura assumed in an interview with Russian state television quoted by the Telegraph. In her last interview with the Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper, the military woman went further and indicated that he was not only fighting the Ukrainians. “I am fighting against NATO,” he guaranteed, describing the territory of Ukraine as a “firing range”.
For Olga Kachura, it was all worth it on the ground – hence the nickname “Lady Death”. The Ukrainian Armed Forces accused her of disguising herself in the Ukrainian military uniform to commit war crimes, thereby sabotaging kyiv’s efforts.
For being part of terrorist groups and for all the war crimes he has committed since 2014, the The Ukrainian courts sentenced her, in January this year, to 12 years in prison, in a trial in absentia, which meant that Olga Kachura never served her sentence.
If on the one hand it was hated by Volodymyr Zelensky’s regime, on the other Olga Kachura was seen as a hero by pro-independence forces in eastern Ukraine. The Telegraph reports that the woman adopted a child in 2014 and even raised a child who survived a military attack, actions that made her popular with pro-Russian forces.
Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the Russia Today television channel and one of the main Kremlin propagandists, paid tribute to Olga Kachura, a “legendary” woman, hailing the initiative of the Russian president to consider her a heroine. “These are our common heroes.”
Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, 97 high-ranking pro-Russian forces have been killed.
Source: Observadora
