Dmito Durnev

I was lucky when I, the son of a nurse from Kramatorsk (Ukraine) who had unsuccessfully entered medical school eight times, entered the Donetsk Medical Institute at the 1st Medical Faculty at the first attempt.

At that moment all complexes went away - I was definitely born lucky! Between the first and the second course I served in the army, in the construction battalion. After that I worked in the specialized neurosurgical reanimation department of the Regional Hospital named after Kalinin.

Since 1996 I started writing articles for the newspaper, while working at the hospital. Since 2002 I have stopped even being listed at the hospital. Worked in a large publishing house, published newspapers, wrote texts, edited them. Since 2014 I have only been writing.

Two of my books came out, which I can't read - they are in Estonian and Italian. The Italian one, co-authored with Giuseppe D'amato, is called Imbroglio Slavo and was published by the Universita Popolare di Torino Editore. It is a kind of handbook on Donbass and the Crimea for students of history at Italian universities.

I've won the Redkollegia Award five times and have been nominated for it 35 times since 2017.
On this project about the Mercenaries and Volunteers of the Russian War against Ukraine I worked in cooperation with the independent Russian media SPEKTR.PRESS.