Heavy Shelling Wounds Georgian Legion Members in Eastern Ukraine
By Tea Mariamidze
Wednesday, December 20
(TBILISI) --.Eight members of the all-volunteer Georgian Legion fighting against Russian and pro-Moscow separatist forces in eastern Ukraine were injured on Monday after coming under heavy fire from high caliber mortars near the frontline positions near Svitlodarsk, in the country’s eastern Donbass region.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) confirmed on Tuesday that six of the eight wounded soldiers are Georgian citizens. The MFA reported that only one of the eight was hospitalized.
The information was also later confirmed by the unit’s commander, Mamuka Mamulashvili, on his Facebook page.
"Unfortunately, today we have eight wounded," Mamulashvili wrote, Ukraine’s state-run UNIAN news agency reported on Tuesday.
The Georgian Legion is fighting on the Ukrainian side just outside Svitlodarsk, a key industrial town.
Formed shortly after Russia invaded and illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula in March 2014, the Georgian National Legion is a unit mainly made up of battle hardened former combat veterans from Georgia’s post-Soviet wars with Moscow.
Mamulashvili is, himself, a veteran of four wars against Russia. As a teenager, he was taken prisoner by Russian forces in Abkhazia in 1993.
Mamulashvili fought in Chechnya and South Ossetia before moving to Ukraine in support of its pro-Western Euromaidan Revolution in 2013.
