Prohrané války Jurije Běljajeva – Sautreuil Pierre (2020)

A former policeman, later a mobster, almost overnight a millionaire who subsequently lost everything, the chairman of an extremely right-wing party, a participant in the war in former Yugoslavia, suspected of the murders of sixty-four Bosniaks, he even attempted an assassination on Boris Yeltsin, gradually becoming a fugitive sought by the Russian secret service FSB. At fifty-eight, he decided to get involved in the war operations of separatists in Luhansk, Ukraine. A peculiar place to hide from the law... When Pierre Sautreuil meets him, he sees an aging, somewhat weary man, the right hand of "Commander Batman" (the rebellious military leader of the separatists, Alexander Bednov, who succumbed to an assassination likely ordered by the president of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic, Igor Plotnitsky, on January 1, 2015). A strange relationship soon develops between the journalistic novice and the seasoned mercenary, seemingly motivated on one side by the need to finally confide in someone about his dark past, to relieve his guilty conscience, and on the other side by a curiosity that gradually grows into a hidden fascination. Against the backdrop of a thrilling personal story full of questions, events unfold that took place in Russia after the collapse of the USSR, leading up to the dirty war in present-day Ukraine. The book has received...