Ukraine has handed over to Russia as part of an exchange a 21-year-old student who had plans to join the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), investigative media outlet Verstka reported on Friday, citing his friends and Ukrainian military sources.

According to Verstka, Alexey Gerasimov was a former student of journalism at the Chuvash State University, who, friends said, openly supported Chuvashia’s secession from Russia. Chuvashia is a republic in Russia’s Volga region where local Chuvash, a Turkic ethnic group, form a two-thirds majority of the population.

“He would debate teachers, saying it was time for Chuvashia to secede from Russia. The teachers reported him and he was mobilised into the army,” Mishshi Oreshnikov, a Chuvash activist who fights for the AFU, told Verstka, though Verstka was unable to confirm this.

Fucking hell. Both Russia and China’s erasure of indigenous Turkic peoples is really bleak.