Ukraine’s deadliest female sniper has claimed Putin will be ‘killed by his own henchmen’ and warned she would kill him herself if she could.
Olena Bilozerska, 44, said Putin “will not live to see the international tribunal where he will be tried” because she believes he will be “killed by his own accomplices” once the “Russian elite realizes that Putin’s rule becomes unprofitable for them.
“Of course I would kill him if I could – but it is unrealistic for me to have such an opportunity,” said Olena, who has been credited with at least 10 confirmed killings in the trenches of the Donbas.
She also described Putin as an “inadequate person” and warned that if he were to succeed in taking over Ukraine, other neighboring countries such as Moldova, Poland or Finland could be invaded next.
The female sniper added that Russia could only be defeated on the battlefield because “Russian politicians never keep their promises” and would break all treaties.
Olena joined the Ukrainian Army in 2014 as a volunteer sniper in Dnipro while working as a journalist in Kiev before becoming a full-time soldier of the Ukrainian Marine Corps in 2018.
She was demobilized in 2020 but returned to fight for her country after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and continues to serve in the Ukrainian Artan special unit.
Although she was demobilized from the Marines in 2020, she and her husband Valeriy Voronov were both still members of the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Services, ready to deploy.
She is something of a celebrity in Ukraine for her best-selling book called “Diary of an Illegal Soldier,” referring to the fact that volunteers like her were technically not allowed to fight on the front lines for the first few years of her service. lines, but the law was changed in 2016.
She was known even before the war because her oppositional journalism saw her threatened with prison by the old hardline regime of Viktor Yanukovych, deposed during the 2014 Maidan Revolution.
Olena also wrote poetry, but found no contradiction between that and fighting, telling MailOnline: ‘A creative nature requires perfectionism in everything, and this helps enormously in my work. But of course I’m not writing poetry now.’
She said just weeks before the 2022 invasion that she does not believe Putin will order an invasion and that his troop build-up was just “pressure and intimidation.”
But when her assessment turned out to be wrong, she and her husband enlisted in an army unit and arrived on the front lines on the day Putin’s forces rained missiles on her hometown of Kiev.
Olena told the Sun that the nature of the war has become more difficult compared to the fighting in 2014 and 2017, due to Russia’s use of drones that allow the enemy to “see you almost all the time.”
The 44-year-old, who now plans and leads raids as a Ukrainian Defense Intelligence Service officer, said Ukraine must continue fighting Russia to take back control of its borders, which were established in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. -Union.
“After that, Ukraine must isolate itself from Russia with a reliable and very well-fortified border, strengthen its army and ultimately join NATO,” Olena told the Sun.
She said Russia fought Ukraine because “it is not satisfied” with its “existence” and that Putin’s country could only be defeated in battle, and not through treaties.
Olena previously said she has no qualms about the men she killed or wounded in battle.
She told MailOnline: ‘Moral anxiety about the ‘murder of a human being’ was invented by people far from the war. An armed enemy is not a person, but a target.
“You’re taking up a weapon against my country, that’s all, you’re a target. If you don’t take him out in time, he might kill you or one of your comrades.’
She said she spares no thoughts for those unlucky enough to find themselves in her line of fire. “If the enemy creeps up to our position to kill me, does he think whether I have a husband, parents or children?” she said.
‘Of course, not. And I don’t worry about stupid things either. That stuff is for books and movies. In real life, anyone who thinks like that in battle is as good as dead.”
Olena’s skills as a sniper are undeniable, as chilling footage from 2017 shows her picking off her targets with ruthless efficiency via night vision goggles fitted with thermal imaging cameras.
As the soundtrack shows a bird fluttering above the silent enemy trench 200 yards away, she is surprised to see two men crawling out of position.
“It was the evening of Ukrainian Independence Day in August 2017,” Olena recalled, “and these Cossacks must have assumed we were drunk in our trenches celebrating.
“I felt something interesting was going to happen when they came out of a trench and passed weapons to each other.”
The sobering footage shows a man crawling out of the trench into the crosshairs of Olena’s gun. She can’t believe her eyes and shouts to her comrade: “Ah, he’s come out! Look, look, look, look – crawling! B*****d.”
Twenty seconds later the image sharpens and her first shot rings out, aimed at the enemy soldier’s torso, quickly followed by two more rounds.
After the screen goes clear from the muzzle flash of the gun, you see another soldier leaning over his comrade and he is similarly dispatched.
Shortly afterwards, another enemy combatant is spotted above the trench level and is felled with a single shot, falling lifelessly backwards out of sight.
“I shot three that night,” Olena said. Two of them were what we call ‘cargo 200’ (an old Soviet military term for dead, referring to the labels on coffins) and the third was ‘cargo 300’ (wounded).”
Then her husband Valeriy, who was sitting next to her in the trench, collected the shell casings and, according to an old sniper tradition from the First World War, had them made into a silver ring for her.
