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Disabled Ukraine fighters hanker for return to front

Parts of their bodies burnt to a putrid pulp, separatist rebels mutilated in a year of conflict between pro- and anti-Russian fighters in eastern Ukraine lie in their hospital beds still hankering to return to the front. I hate 'the Nazis'", he adds, referring to claims by the separatists that the government in Kiev is stacked with the kind of right wing Ukraine nationalists that fought with the Nazis in World War II. The shaven headed, tattooed former metal-worker said he had been "touched" by what happened last year in Odessa, eastern Ukraine, where 40 people, most of them pro-Russian activists, were burnt alive after clashes with pro-Ukrainian activists. Likewise he was upset by incidents in the majority Russian-speaking port of Mariupol where he claimed Ukrainian army soldiers fired on civilians. Injured in Spartak, near the once state-of-the-art now flattened Donetsk airport, just 48 hours before a ceasefire was reached in the Belarussian city of Minsk, he is one of the last fighters disabled in a conflict that has left 6,000 dead and ravaged Ukraine's economy.