Russian Sailor Gets Radiation Poisoning Doing Laundry After Return From Ukraine

Russian military lawyer Petr Portnyagin was quoted by the URA.ru and Lenta.ru news sites as saying that a sailor, from Yekaterinburg, was deployed from the aircraft carrier “Admiral Kuznetsov,”  which has been out of commission and undergoing refitting in Murmansk since 2017, to serve in President Vladimir Putin’s special military operation (SVO).

As Kyiv Post reported in September, families of the crew of the Russian cruiser who were sent to Ukraine to serve as mechanized infantry were seeking information on the fate of their loved ones.

According to the lawyer, the sailor had returned from the war in Ukraine after sustaining severe concussion and shrapnel wounds during combat. He said the individual was on board an unnamed naval vessel on the territory of an unspecified “unfriendly nation” when he washed his clothes in water that turned out to be contaminated with radioactive material.

Portnyagin said that after a few days the sailor began to display symptoms of radiation sickness saying, “The soldier now has necrosis, bone destruction – he has literally begun to rot alive.” The lawyer said the man now faced an ugly prognosis due to the radiation exposure and hopes that his deteriorating condition may allow him to be discharged from the military and to avoid further combat duty in Ukraine.

“He has given his entire life to the military,” Portnyagin said, adding that in the 1990s, he had been shot in the head, where the bullet remains to this day. During his naval service he had not only served on the “Admiral Kuznetsov” but was present during the Kursk submarine disaster. The Russian nuclear-powered submarine K-141 Kursk sank in the Barents Sea on Aug, 12 2000, following an unspecified accident, with the loss of all 118 personnel on board.

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Although the naval vessel, location and timing of the incident weren’t revealed Portnyagin said the presence of contaminated water that led to the serviceman’s radiation poisoning, highlights severe ongoing issues regarding the safety conditions faced by many members of the Russian forces from aging, poorly maintained equipment in their places of duty.