British newspaper The Telegraph appears to have covered up the repeated use of an anti-gay slur by Ukrainian fighters in a combat video. The clip was published by the outlet on its YouTube channel two months ago, although questions over the translation were widely picked up online only this week.
The bodycam footage appeared to show Russian-speaking Ukrainian troops repelling an attack on their positions outside the Donbass city of Artyomovsk (known in Ukraine as Bakhmut).
Seemingly shot in early spring, the video offers little commentary on the fighting, and instead provides viewers with captions on the communication between the Ukrainian fighters.
“Russian soldiers are referred to as ‘orcs’ by the Ukrainian fighters,” a caption by The Telegraph claims early on in the clip.
In reality, however, the Ukrainian troops refer to the attacking Russian soldiers using a term which translates as “f****ts.” The Ukrainian fighters use the slur multiple times during the close-quarters trench gunfight, with all instances of it captioned as “orcs.”
Judging by the watermarks on the video, it was shot by fighters with the so-called DaVinci Wolves unit, a self-styled elite mechanized infantry battalion of the Ukrainian military. The leader of the unit, notorious neo-Nazi Dmitry ‘DaVinci’ Kotsyubailo, was killed on the front lines in early March, and was granted a state-level funeral with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in attendance.