They captured Bagira, a Russian sniper who killed more than 40 Ukrainians

A Russian sniper with 40 dead in her name was captured after being abandoned on the battlefield, Ukrainian intelligence sources reported.

Irina Starikova, whose war name is Bagira, is said to have told her captors that she was left to die after being wounded in a battle with Ukrainian troops.

According to the Peacemaker Center, which investigates the crimes committed by Russian separatists in the Ukrainian war, he is 41 years old.

She also has two daughters, aged 11 and 9, and is divorced from her father, Alexander Fedotov.

Starikova served with the forces of the Russian separatist region of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, which has been fighting the government in Kiev since 2014.

The capture of Starikova was also confirmed by Giorgi Revishvili, a researcher in the Department of War Studies at King's College London.

“Ukrainian forces captured the infamous snipers fighting on the side of ORDLO (temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine), the name of the Bagira war,” Revishvili wrote on Twitter referring to the name Kyiv gives to Russian-speaking separatist regions.

Revishvili added that she is reportedly responsible for “killing 40 Ukrainians, including civilians.”

Starikova is reportedly originally from Serbia and has been persecuted by Ukrainians since 2014.

Ukraine's Obozrevatel news website cites a soldier named Vlad Ivanov who said Starikova received medical treatment when she was captured.

She is quoted as saying that “they left knowing that I was hurt and they had the opportunity to pick me up in the hope that I would die”.

Starikova was a sniper from the 11th Special Operations Division. According to the Peacemaker Center, she has been awarded the George Cross Medal for her work.

Investigators also say she is married to a soldier from Belarus named Aleksandr Ogrenich.

According to a 2017 report by the Ukrainian Union for Human Rights in Helsinki, he calls himself Gorynych and also fights for the Russian separatist armed forces.

Russia supported separatist insurgents in eastern Ukraine during a conflict that killed more than 14,000 people in seven years.

The open conflict was triggered by the Ukrainian revolution in 2014, when an uprising overthrew Viktor Yanukovych's pro-Russian government.

Vladimir Putin's forces reacted by annexing the Crimean region of Ukraine, a move that was widely condemned by the West.

A Canadian soldier described as one of the deadliest snipers in the world is reportedly fighting on the Ukrainian side.

The trained killer, nicknamed Wali, responded to President Volodymyr Zelensky's call for foreign volunteers.

The 40-year-old was previously deployed twice in Afghanistan as a sniper for the Canadian Armed Forces between 2009 and 2011.

Wali had previously traveled to Iraq on his own to fight ISIS in 2015.

Equipped with a £5,000 military-grade .338 sniper rifle, the dreaded shooter claims he can kill at a distance of 1,531 yards.

KEEP READING