Dr Igor Nesteruk
(Picture: The Times)A 67-year-old maths professor has told how he has picked up a Kalashnikov for the first time to defend his city of Kyiv from Russian troops.
Dr Igor Nesteruk, a professor of applied mathematics, is the oldest volunteer defending his neighbourhood of Tatarka but he is far from the oldest to have taken up arms to defend Ukraine.
He told The Times newspaper: “I never thought at my age I would be carrying a gun... I don’t really know how to shoot it either. I never have before.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has seen civilians take up arms given by the Government to defend their land as part of the Territorial Defence Force.
While around a million women and children have fled the devastating conflict, men aged between 18 and 60 have been barred from leaving the country.
Kyiv, along with other major cities, have come under intense bombardment by Russian forces including in residential areas.
Armed civilians have now bracing themselves for a drawn-out battle for the capital with street-to-street fighting.
Nesteruk’s last work before joining the civil resistance was an epidemiological paper on Omicron.
“I lined up early and got it on the first day of the invasion. I was lucky to get it. They are in short supply now. They don’t give them any more to old men like me,” he added.
The professor told the paper his tactics for sorting out Russian speakers from Ukrainian ones is to ask them to pronounce certain words - including the word for the national pastry called “palyanitsa”.
His unit used the tactic when intercepting a stranger from Crimea several days ago, he said, with the police coming to verify the stranger’s identity when he could not pronounce the word.
