The Lost Wars of Yuri Belyaev

An ex-policeman, later a mafioso, a millionaire almost overnight who then lost everything, chairman of an extreme right-wing party, a participant in the war in former Yugoslavia, suspected of murdering sixty-four Bosniaks, he even attempted to assassinate Boris Yeltsin, and eventually became a fugitive hunted by the Russian secret service, the FSB. At the age of fifty-eight, he decided to join the separatist military operations in Luhansk, Ukraine. A strange place to hide from the law.

When Pierre Sautreuil meets him, he sees an ageing, somewhat tired man, the right-hand man of "Commander Batman" (the rebellious military commander of the separatists, Alexander Bednov, who was assassinated on 1st January 2015, most likely on the orders of Igor Plotnitsky, the president of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic). A strange relationship soon develops between the novice journalist and the seasoned mercenary, motivated on one side by the need to finally confide his dark past to someone and ease his guilty conscience, and on the other by a curiosity that gradually grows into a hidden fascination.

Against the backdrop of a thrilling personal story full of question marks, the events that took place in Russia after the collapse of the USSR unfold, leading up to the dirty war in present-day Ukraine.

The book was awarded the "Prix du Réel" literary prize in 2018, which is an award given to texts of a reportage nature.

Pierre Sautreuil (1993) is a French writer and journalist. In 2014, he was a freelance correspondent for the magazine L'Obs in Russia and Ukraine. In 2015, he won the Bayeux-Calvados Award for war correspondents in the "young reporter" category for his text "New Russia," published in L'Obs.