A Russian pilot who was missing and presumed dead for more than three decades after his plane was shot down during the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan has been found alive and wants to return to Russia, according to a military veterans group.
Valery Vostrotin, head of the Russian paratroopers' union and co-chair of a joint Russian-US commission on prisoners of war and missing soldiers, told the RIA Novosti state news agency: "He is still alive. It's very astonishing. Now he needs help." He declined to name the pilot for reasons of confidentiality.
Vyacheslav Kalinin, deputy head of the veterans' organisation Battle Brotherhood, said the man was shot down in 1987 and was likely now over 60. He suggested the pilot could be in Pakistan, where Afghanistan had camps for prisoners of war, and said he wanted to return home.
RIA Novosti reported that 125 Soviet planes were shot down during the war, which lasted from 1979 to 1989. When Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, about 300 soldiers were listed as missing; since then, 30 have been found and most returned to their home countries. The Kommersant business daily identified the only Soviet pilot shot down in 1987 as Sergei Pantelyuk, from the Rostov region, who went missing after taking off from Bagram airfield, now a US air base north of Kabul.
According to local veterans' officials, Pantelyuk's mother and sister are still alive, and Komsomolskaya Pravda traced his 31-year-old daughter, born months before he went missing. Senator Frants Klintsevich said this was not an isolated case, recalling a former Soviet soldier he met in Afghanistan who refused to give his name and said it was too late to return.
Not all former soldiers wish to leave. Bakhretdin Khakimov, interviewed by AFP in 2015, stayed in Afghanistan after being wounded, converted to Islam and said: "I stayed in Afghanistan because Afghans are very kind and hospitable people."
