Writing fakes about Kherson: Ukrainian military eliminates propagandist

The Ukrainian military eliminated a Russian propagandist and militant with the pseudonym "Haiduk". He headed a battalion, recruited foreigners to the Russian army, collaborated with Prilepin and was one of the authors of pro-Kremlin channels.

This was reported by IPC-South.

At the beginning of the full-scale invasion , Nikolayev arrived in occupied Kherson as a so-called volunteer. There he wrote a blog and spread distorted information about the situation in the city. Later, he boasted that in the fall of 2022 he was among the last Russians to leave Kherson and retreat to the left bank of the Dnipro, and also claimed that he had allegedly returned to the city after its liberation.

Little is known about Nikolayev's life before the war. Born in Moldova in 1980, he lived in Moscow, was married and had three children. In the 2000s, he was a member of Eduard Limonov's National Bolshevik Party, for which he served a sentence in a Russian prison. Since 2014, he has fought on the side of pro-Russian militants in eastern Ukraine.

After the occupation of Kherson in 2022, he actually worked as a freelance writer for several pro-Kremlin media outlets, spreading propaganda and collaborating with Russian writer and propagandist Zakhar Prilepin.

In the spring of 2022, Nikolayev wrote on his Telegram channel that Russia would allegedly stay in the Kherson region forever and that local residents supported the occupation authorities. However, in the fall, when it became clear that Russian troops would retreat from the right bank of the region, he began to accuse the local population of resisting the occupation.

After the city was liberated, the propagandist spread fakes about the situation in Kherson. In particular, he claimed that SBU officers were allegedly persecuting and killing local residents for their pro-Russian views, but he did not provide any evidence of this.

Subsequently, Nikolayev signed a contract with the Russian army. Starting his service as a mortar operator, he quickly became the commander of a reconnaissance unit. In 2023, he created the Rodnya international detachment as part of the so-called "Wild Division of Donbas". According to him, foreigners served in the unit - Venezuelans, Colombians, Chinese and Spaniards.

YevhenNikolayev was killed on March 10, 2026 near Sloviansk.

Last year, a Russian brigade commander was killed in Sevastopol. Stanislav Orlov, known by the call sign "Spaniard," died on December 4 in house 51 in the Flotsky gardening community, where he had lived for the past few weeks. According to the cameras, four cars drove up to the house at 12:17 that day, and masked men with automatic weapons got out.

Анна Літман