Mikhail Shchebetun signed a contract with the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation on January 31, 2024. Until February 11, the man was in a training unit in Kursk, and then got into the military unit 29760, 25th brigade under the command of Alexei Ksenofontov (on the photo), aka “Tiger”, his wife Alina Bolvinova told ASTRA.
“The last time my husband called me was on February 14, 2024… he told me in plainly that this was most likely our last conversation with him, since they had already been warned that as soon as they were in place [near Avdiivka], their phones would be taken away. The commander made it clear to them that they were being taken to their deaths,” she claims.
After this conversation, Alina did not know anything about her husband’s fate for a month and a half. The woman began to look for his comrades and their relatives on her own, and in April she learned from several that he had died in the assault on March 9. Only after that he was added to the missing list. Later, the acting commander of the unit confirmed to Alina at a personal reception that Mikhail had indeed not returned from a combat mission on March 9.
According to colleagues, that day the commander of the 25th brigade, Colonel Alexei Ksenofontov with the call sign “Tiger” got drunk, and being “in a bad mood”, sent the mobilized and contract soldiers to a deadly assault, and then, according to Alina, “watched and enjoyed how the AFU crushed our fighters alive with tanks, threw drones “Baba Yaga”. Mikhail was among the dead.
Alina, despite the confirmation of the death, still cannot obtain a certificate of her husband’s death.
“How long will the brigade commander Alexei Xenophontov mock the fighters, torture them and purposefully send them to death? And do you think our army really deserves such commanders as “Eagle” [Andrey Ivanovich Syrotyuk], who, according to regularly occuring information on the Internet, allows himself to annul our fighters who refuse to carry out their criminal orders with the Tiger, or such a commander as the current acting m/u 29760 Averin D. S. who is unable to make strong-willed decisions and take responsibility …?”, Alina said in her appeal to Putin.
In April of this year, propagandist Vladimir Solovyov made a story with Ksenofontov, from which it became known that the colonel had already received the Hero of Russia. In the comments under the story on VKontakte, there are dozens of messages from relatives of the dead and missing soldiers who were subordinate to the “Tiger”. Women ask where their relatives are, for what reason there is no evacuation of bodies, why their husbands were sent to deadly assaults, why the military “drops down like flies”, and also wish the “Tiger” to “die a painful death in civilian life.”
