A FEMALE Russian sniper with 40 kills to her name was captured after being abandoned on the battlefield, تم الإبلاغ عنه.

Irina Starikova – whose call sign is Bagira – reportedly told her captors she was left to die after being wounded in a battle with Ukrainian troops.

She served with the forces of the Russian separatist Donetsk region of eastern أوكرانيا, which has been fighting the government in Kyiv since 2014.

Her capture was announced by the Ukrainian armed forces, who said she “shot our prisoners in 2014”, alongside pictures of her.

Starikova’s capture was also confirmed by Giorgi Revishvili, a researcher at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.

He tweeted that “Ukrainian forces captured infamous sniper fighting on the side of ORDLO, call sign Bagira” referring to the name Kyiv gives to the breakaway Russian-speaking regions.

Revishvili added reportedly she is responsible for “killing 40 Ukrainians including civilians”.

وفقا للتقارير, Starikova is originally from Serbia and has been hunted by the Ukrainians since 2014.

Ukraine’s Obozrevatel news website quotes a soldier named Vlad Ivanov who said that Starikova was provided with medical treatment when captured.

She is quoted as saying that “they left, knowing that I was injured and had the opportunity to pick me up…hoping that I would die”.

Starikova was a sniper of 11th Specialized Special Operations Division, it was claimed.

Mystery surrounds Starikova’s background, with reports said she’s a former handball player named Daniela Lazovic, who has a conviction for drug trafficking.

It has even been suggested she was a nun at one point in her life.

Russia supported the separatist insurgents in eastern Ukraine during a conflict which killed more than 14,000 people in seven years.

The open conflict was triggered by the Ukrainian Revolution in 2014 – when an uprising overthrew the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych.

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يتعلق الأمر….

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• Up to 40,000 Ukrainians have been snatched from besieged cities and forced into Russian slave labour in a war crime.
• Chilling footage shows injured Russian soldiers looking terrified as they are awarded bravery medals for their role in Putin’s Ukraine invasion.
• Russia wants to split Ukraine in half like North and South Korea, the country’s military intelligence chief has warned.
• أ blind mystic who is said to have predicted 9/11 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine claimed Putin will become “lord of the world”.
• Civilians in Kyiv have resorted to drinking sewage water as the city continues to be bombarded by horror Russian missile strikes.

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Vladimir Putin’s forces reacted by annexing the region of Crimea from Ukraine – a move which was widely condemned by the West.

Reportedly fighting on the Ukrainian side is a Canadian solider described as one of the world’s deadliest snipers.

The trained killer, nicknamed Wali answered President Volodymyr Zelensky’s call for foreign volunteers.

The 40-year-old was previously deployed twice to Afghanistan as a sniper with the Canadian Armed Forces between 2009 و 2011.

Wali had previously travelled to Iraq on his own to fight against ISIS في 2015.

Equipped with a £5,000 military-grade .338 sniper rifle, the feared marksman claims he can kill at a range of 1,531 ياردات.