Oleksandr Isaev defected from the Ukrainian armed forces in 2014 and went on to command Russia’s 8th Artillery Regiment. A colonel in the Russian armed forces who defected from the Ukrainian military in 2014 has been killed in a targeted Ukrainian drone operation, a government information source has reported. Col. Oleksandr Isaev died in southern Ukraine’s Kherson region on September 19, according to the ‘Book of Executioners,’ a government database established by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2022 to document Russian war crimes. Isaev was commander of Russia’s 8th Artillery Regiment, part of a task force that operates in the south of Ukraine. Before defecting, Isaev, a native of the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv, was a deputy commander of a Ukrainian Navy unit carrying out coastal defense missions. The Book of Executioners provided no further details of Isaev’s death, which has not been confirmed by either the General Staff of Ukraine’s armed forces or the country’s defense ministry.
Col. Oleksandr Isaev was reportedly killed in an FPV drone strike (Wikimedia Commons, Book of Executioners)
