A notorious Russian militant fighting for Russian-separatist troops in Ukraine’s Donbas and allegedly linked to the 2014 MH17 plane crash has recently fled the war zone after begging for money online.
The mercenary, Ivan Golovanov, said on the Russian Vkontakte social network on Feb. 17 that he had left Ukraine’s Russian-occupied territories for Rostov, one of the Russian cities closest to Ukraine.
In early February Golovanov, who’s been actively posting online about fighting against the Ukrainian government forces in the Donbas, announced that he wanted to leave Ukraine and begged for money to travel to Russia.
Golovanov published two videos urging his supporters to donate money to him because he was in dire straits. He said he had been getting a mere 5,000 ruble ($88) salary per month.
Golovanov was born in the Russian city of Astrakhan, then lived in Ukraine’s Donbas and fought for Russian-separatist forces in 2014 to 2016.
“I want to go to Russia, and I need your help,” he says in the video. “I need your financial assistance because I’m absolutely broke.”
Meanwhile, in 2015 Golovanov published video footage showing a storage of damaged military equipment in the city of Snizhne in Donetsk Oblast.
The equipment included a Volvo FH-13 heavy truck with a blue stripe that had been filmed transporting the Buk missile that shot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 on July 17, 2014, according to Ukraine’s InformNapalm open-source intelligence project. All 298 people on board the airliner were killed.
In 2016 the Dutch-based Joint Investigative Team concluded that the aircraft was shot down with a 9M38 Buk missile fired from a Russian-controlled field near Pervomaisky, a town 6 kilometers south of Snizhne. It also found the Buk missile system had been transported from Russia into Ukraine on the day of the crash, and then back into Russia after the crash, with one missile less than it arrived with.
According to photo, video and text evidence collected by Bellingcat, a British open-source intelligence outfit, the convoy containing the Buk M-1 missile system that later shot down the Boeing left the 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade base in the Russian city of Kursk on June 23. It reached the city of Millerovo in Rostov Oblast close to the Ukrainian border on June 25.
Bellingcat identified the Russian officer with the nom-de-guerre Khmury as one of those involved in the MH17 crash.
