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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
Ukrainian civic and political figure, co-founder of UNA-UNSO, former Russian prisoner Mykola Karpyuk was killed on the front in Zaporizhzhia region at the age of 62.
"On the front, on the Zaporizhzhia direction, Mykola Karpyuk was killed. The person whom Russia held in its prisons and whom we managed to bring back to Ukraine… He was truly a strong figure. And today I was informed that he was killed. And this is yet another great loss for Ukraine," wrote independent People's Deputy of the VIII convocation of the Verkhovna Rada and blogger Boryslav Bereza on Facebook on Sunday.
Head of the Research and Analytical Group InfoLight.UA Yurii Honcharenko and first deputy head of the party UDAR of Vitali Klitschko Artur Palatnyi confirmed this information.
"Mykola Karpyuk has been killed… A man who devoted his whole life to Ukraine, who never chased glory, money, or positions. A man who endured torture in a Russian prison. Who was kidnapped in 2014 because they understood his importance for Ukraine's national movement. One of the greatest warriors lived and has gone! He died in battle, as he lived his whole life," Honcharenko wrote on Facebook.
"My friend, a man of indomitable will and a true patriot of Ukraine — Mykola Karpyuk — has passed away… Mykola Andronovych devoted his life to the struggle for Ukraine. He went through revolutions, years of Russian captivity, and severe trials, but remained unbroken. Even after 60 years he went to fight, to defend his native land," Palatnyi wrote.
Karpyuk, born 1964, joined the Ukrainian Helsinki Union as early as 1989, later headed the Rivne regional organization of the Ukrainian National Assembly (UNA), formed and became commander of the first detachment of the Ukrainian National Self-Defense (UNSO). In 1992–93 he took part in the war in Moldova, in 1993 — in Georgia. In 2000–01 he participated in the "Ukraine without Kuchma" campaign, for which he was sentenced to five years in prison; in October 2015 the European Court of Human Rights issued a decision according to which the state of Ukraine had to pay Karpyuk compensation. After his release he took part in the Orange Revolution; in 2005 he was awarded the Order "For Courage" Third Class. In 2013–14 he participated in the confrontations during the Revolution of Dignity.
In 2014 he went to Russia for negotiations regarding the annulment of the illegal "referendum" on the annexation of Crimea, where he was detained, imprisoned, and subjected to torture. Together with another Ukrainian, Stanislav Klykh, he was convicted in a case about participation in combat operations in the first Chechen campaign as part of UNA-UNSO. In 2019 he was released from a Russian prison together with other 34 Ukrainian hostages during a prisoner exchange between Ukraine and Russia. With the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine he took up the defense of Ukraine.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Україна втратила незламного борця, на фронті загинув Микола Карпюк". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: Bagnet.
