A few relatvies appear to accept their loved ones’ fates. In an interview with a Moscow radio station, the father of Nikolai Kozlov, a 21-year-old paratrooper from a unit in Ulyanovsk who lost his leg, said he was proud of his son. “He gave his vow and carried out his orders,” he said. A state television report on Mr Kozlov’s progress in hospital was cut with footage of street fighting and tanks flying Ukrainian flags. The report presented him as “the man who was until recently in hell’s corner and who at last returned home to Russia”. It did not say where from.