Ukrainian forces eliminated propagandist and militant Yevheniy «Haiduk» Nikolaev. The man commanded the «Rodnya» battalion, recruited foreigners into service in the Russian Armed Forces, was an associate of Zakhar Prilepin and co-author of several influential enemy Telegram channels, including «Wargonzo». At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Nikolaev arrived in occupied Kherson as a volunteer and ran a blog, distorting information about life in the city. The man boasted that in the autumn of 2022 he was almost the last Russian who fled Kherson to the left bank of the Dnipro and even allegedly returned to the right bank after its liberation.
This was reported by correspondents «IPC-Pivden».
Little is known about Nikolaev’s life before the Russo-Ukrainian war. He was born in Moldova in 1980, lived in Moscow, and has a wife and three children. In the 2000s “Haiduk” was a member of Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party, for which he served a term in a Russian prison. From 2014 he fought on the side of pro-Russian militants in eastern Ukraine.
Nikolaev ended up in Kherson after the city was occupied by Russians in early 2022. He was considered a «volunteer», but mostly performed the duties of an «unofficial journalist» for several pro‑Kremlin outlets, retransmitting distorted information about the situation in the city, closely cooperating with another Russian propagandist, Zakhar Prilepin.
By the autumn of 2022 he realized that the Russians would flee from the right bank of the Kherson region and blamed the pro‑Ukrainian population of the region, which resisted the occupation.
According to the deceased, he «left the city last» and even dedicated several poems to this. The man liked to tell how he somehow «returned to Kherson» after November 11, 2022, although he never provided evidence for these claims. Later Nikolaev began producing fakes about the situation in the already liberated city. According to him, employees of the Security Service of Ukraine allegedly shot Kherson residents for their pro‑Russian position.
«Haiduk» was eliminated on March 10, 2026 near Sloviansk. Before his death the militant managed to publish a book dedicated to the occupation of Ukrainian lands by the Russians titled «My Novorossiya».