Donetsk, Jul 26 — DAN. Fragments of a memorial plaque have been found at a Ukrainian shell impact site in central Donetsk which came under fire on Tuesday. The plaque was unveiled in September 2018 to honor Great Patriotic War veteran, honorary citizen of Donetsk Ivan Kulaga.
Kiev forces shelled the city’s Kievsky and Voroshilovsky districts on Tuesday damaging windows of an apartment building in Roza Luxembourg Street where the plaque was installed. DAN correspondents found plaque fragments as they were recording the aftermath of the shelling.
Ivan Kulaga was born in the village of Nelepovka outside Dzerzhinsk on September 9, 1921. He graduated from the Krasnoselskoye Agricultural College. He was called up for military service as the Great Patriotic War broke out. He served with mechanized troops and later on was transferred to counterintelligence. He was in East Prussia when the Soviet Union won the war. Kulaga was decorated with two Orders of the Red Star and one medal “For Courage.” In 2016, DPR Head Alexander Zakharchenko presented him with the medal “For Labor Glory.”
After the war, the veteran took an active part in perpetuating the names of fallen soldiers. He initiated projects to build war monuments, open Military Glory museums and publish books about the heroic fight of his fellow countrymen. He found and published the names of more than 400,000 soldiers from Donetsk and the Donetsk region who fell in battle. Ivan Kulaga died in July 2018. He was 97.*jk