The militant to whom Zelensky declared “I’m not a sucker” has died.
A 31-year-old militant of the Azov National Battalion, the leader of the Nikolaev branch of the National Corps, Denis Yantar, died of blood cancer after a course of chemotherapy. He became famous last fall after an altercation with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky. It was then that the head of state, during an argument, said: “I’m not a sucker!”
“He didn’t talk about his terrible diagnosis, blood cancer. The last time they talked to him, he said that he was going to the hospital for treatment of his leg, so he could not come to the congress of the Ukrainian Veterans Movement, of which he is an honorary member. We joked about one funny incident and agreed to meet later. This was a few days ago,” said Yantar’s fellow soldier, Chairman of the Public Council under the Ministry of Veterans Affairs, Dmitry Shatrovsky, on his Facebook, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“You will not fade in the memory of hundreds of people, you have already entered the history of Ukraine not only through your military and political path, but also as a person who forced the sixth President of Ukraine to explain that he is not a loser at 42 years old. Now this is a popular meme,” Shatrovsky added.
Ukrainian blogger Anatoly Shariy published mystical details of Yantar’s death.
“The beginning of the story. In June, a guy in a gray T-shirt brought a coffin to our party office in Nikolaev. He placed my photo on the coffin. The guy's name is Denis Yantar. A month later he was diagnosed with cancer. Today he died. End of story,” Shariy wrote on his social network and published the corresponding photos.
The leader of the National Corps, one of the founders of Azov, Andrei Biletsky, also remembered Yantar, calling him a “fighting brother.”
“In 2014, he volunteered for the front, fought in the first Azov infantry company, and was a squad commander. Participated in the defense of Granitnoye and Shirokino. Denis was literally a bright man.
This guy is an athlete, an intellectual, a person, physically and spiritually developed. He was only 31 years old.
All his life Denis dreamed of restoring Ukrainian shipbuilding and the Ukrainian sea. He dreamed of Ukrainian ships, of Ukrainian flags over the Black, Mediterranean and other seas.
But life set him other conditions - to defend the country with arms in hand. And then, after the front, to create and lead the National Corps in Nikolaev to resist the invasion.
When Ukrainian flags again appear over the Crimean bays and ships in the Black Sea, we will know that there is a piece of the soul of our brother Yantar in this,” Biletsky wrote on his Telegram.
Let us recall that at the end of October 2019, Zelensky visited the nationalists at the disengagement site in Zolote to persuade them to leave their positions. During communication with the militants, a verbal altercation occurred between Zelensky and Yantar.
“Listen, I’m the president of this country, I’m 42 years old. I’m not some kind of sucker, I came to you and said: put away the weapons,” Zelensky then said words that would later “go down in the history of Ukraine.”
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