Video of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers fighting hand-to-hand released, Ukrainian soldier asked to be allowed to die peacefully before he died

On January 3, Russian media outlet Russia Today (RT) shared a video showing "Russian and Ukrainian soldiers in an intense hand-to-hand combat on the battlefield." According to the outlet, the video was captured by a camera on the uniform of the Ukrainian soldier, who died in the fight. The footage and the conversation of the two soldiers afterward has captured people's attention as it circulated online.

Following the RT article, US billionaire space entrepreneur and tech mogul Elon Musk commented on the story via his own social media account on the platform X, which he owns.

According to RT, the altercation started when a Ukrainian soldier in the video began to search a building for possible "intruders" in the Donetsk region in October 2024 (note: the exact date of this incident is inconsistent in the published article), not knowing that a nearby Russian soldier had taken refuge there. After a brief exchanging of gunfire, the two soldiers started attacking each other with combat knives strapped to their forearms and rocks they picked from the ground.

After about 6 minutes of fighting, Ukrainian soldier falls to the ground, having been wounded by multiple knife thrusts, including an apparent stab to the chest. The Russian soldier stops hitting him and waits for a few more moments.

Suddenly, the Ukrainian soldier speaks. "I want to die in solitude," he says, adding a message to the Russian soldier, "you were the best soldier in the world". The Russian soldier tells him that he did very well, and then he stands up and leaves as per the other man's request.

The video ends with distant explosions and bursts of gunfire. RT noted that the camera stopped working shortly after it ended.

In addition to the video, RT released an online interview with the Russian soldier, who said his name was Andrei Grechanyyev, and that he's from the Sakha (Yakutia) Republic in the Russian Far East.

Andrey said that he remembered when "the grenade from our machine gun hit a window and exploded" inside the same building he was hiding in, and then he saw a Ukrainian soldier searching for him. He said the Ukrainian soldier was much bigger than him, which meant that the fight was incredibly difficult because "it wasn't about skill, but purely about endurance".

When questioned about the video, Andrey said that the two of them decided to talk to each other after the fight, and that what they mainly said to each other was, "You're a real warrior".

The Russian soldier claimed that he saw this Ukrainian man had a wound that was hard to survive from, and he also saw two other severely injured comrades who were dying. "I took that grenade that I found, loaded it, set it to 10 seconds, threw it, and then, having waited for a while, fired bursts at these places with my AK," Grechanyev said. "I did this so that they would not suffer, and the Germans would not torture them, torture and send them to their motherland."

RT asked Grechanyyev how it was possible that he could "have a conversation with an adversary, an enemy" right in the middle of their battlefield. "To be honest," he replied before pausing for a long time. "That was the goal, actually. We came here to survive," he said. "I remember when I was in elementary school... our teacher told us the famous saying: 'No matter how the wolf twists you, always stay a human'."

After the RT news story made the rounds online on January 3, Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX who owns the formerly Twitter-owned social platform X, shared his view on the video on his personal X account.

"To be prepared, I installed a WWI era trench knife on the wall of my bedroom," read the tweet's text, while the tweet's image shows Musk's bedroom with a large trench knife displayed on the bedroom wall. "Made in 1917. Much more useful in a close encounter than a gun."