Brothers in arms who embraced a new life left facing death
THEY were brothers in arms in the trenches and Shaun Pinner and Aiden Aslin now face paying the ultimate price side by side for defending the country they had made their second home.
The individual journeys that led the British fighters to this impossible point bear strikingly similarities.
Both men decided to give up their ordinary jobs in England in 2018 to move to Ukraine where they formally joined the country’s armed forces.
Mr Pinner, 48, a former British serviceman from Watford was working in waste management and had had enough of the 16-hour days and long commutes on the M25. Mr Aslin, 28, who has fought against Islamic State terrorists in Syria, decided to give up his job as a care home worker in his native Newark, Nottinghamshire, and moved to Ukraine after meeting his fiancee while travelling.
He moved in with her in Mykolaiv, southern Ukraine, where he eventually proposed and the couple began making plans to marry this summer and start a family before Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolled over the border from Russia.
Divorced father Mr Pinner, who has served in the Royal Anglian Regiment, also moved to Mariupol in 2018 where he would eventually meet and marry his second wife Larysa, a native of the city.
Both men bought properties in Ukraine and became dual citizens embracing the country as their second home.
They soon became close friends after taking up arms against Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, often visiting each other at their respective frontline
‘Desperately seeking answers’
positions. Photographs of the two soldiers together in the trenches before the start of the war show them looking healthy and smiling.
They are a stark contrast to recent images of them appearing gaunt with shaven heads, side by side in a caged dock for their ‘show trial’ which has seen them handed the death sentence.
Their families insist they are regular members of the Ukrainian forces but the self-styled Donetsk People’s Republic has branded them foreign spies rather than prisoners of war.
‘The crimes they committed were monstrous,’ the eastern republic’s president Denis Pushilin has claimed.
Mr Aslin’s anguished mother Angela Wood, 50, who spent much of yesterday at the Ukrainian Embassy desperately seeking answers, has said her ‘son will be just as scared as we are’.
His family said he signed up to the Ukrainian military in 2018 because he struggled to find work after moving to the country.
While he has no official military experience in the UK, he had joined the Kurdish People’s Protection Units in Syria in 2015 after being horrified by the atrocities committed by Islamic State.
He returned to the UK the following year where he was questioned by Scotland Yard before being released without charge.
By the time of his capture in April, he had already completed three tours in Ukraine while Mr Pinner, who spent seven years in the British Army, was a veteran of four.
Mr Pinner, who has an adult son in Britain, was promoted to commander of his marines unit within six months of joining and is said to be a well respected soldier.
His family said he had ‘enjoyed the Ukrainian way of life and considered Ukraine as his adopted country’. His three-year contract was due to expire at the end of the year and he was planning to take on a humanitarian role.
The friends were captured within a week of each other while fighting with their Ukrainian units as they joined a heroic last stand in Mariupol – the bloodiest battleground of the war so far.
The port city was encircled by Russian troops in the early days of the invasion and tens of thousands of residents were killed during indiscriminate bombing.
After 48 days of fighting, Mr Aslin said his unit – the 36th Marine Brigade – was forced to surrender after running out of food and ammunition in their Azovstal redoubt.
By this time he had amassed tens of thousands of followers on social media after posting images and videos of destroyed Russian tanks under the name Cossack Gundi ‘It’s been a pleasure everyone, I hope this war ends soon,’ he said in a final message on Twitter.
Footage later emerged in which Mr Aslin can be seen just before he surrendered to Russian soldiers.
In the clip he walked through the ruins of the steel plant that became the site of the defenders’ last stand saying: ‘If you are watching this video, it means that we have surand
rendered. We have finally exhausted all our resources. We’ve run out of ammunition, food.’
He was later paraded on russian tV, bloodied and bruised where he was branded a mercenary ‘used to perform various delicate tasks’.
He was also filmed being led around in handcuffs with a cut to his forehead which was not visible in the video and he appeared to slur his words.
A week later Mr Pinner was also captured by russian troops in the besieged city. He was with fellow marines when he was seized after being wounded by a tank round.
friends described him as a ‘gentle man’ and said he was ‘funny, much loved and well intentioned’.
One said: ‘Shaun was no war tourist, he took on a contract to be with someone he fell in love with, he fought with bravery knowing the risks. there are few men of this calibre.’