For Soviet-Afghan war veterans, Ukraine is a conflict 'without honour'

When Iurie Cibuc was 18-years-old, he was drafted into the Soviet army to fight in Afghanistan.

“I did three months of training. I learned to throw grenades, shoot with a rifle,” Cibuc, now 62, told Euronews in Chisinau, Moldova.

He joined a conflict that would cost the Soviet Union 15,000 soldiers - at least 300 of them from Moldova, then the Moldovian Soviet Socialist Republic - and become known as "the USSR’s Vietnam". The "mujahideen" that drove the Soviets from Afghanistan in 1988 would ultimately become the Taliban, the hardline Islamists that are in power in Kabul today.

Four decades later, Cibuc remembers the mujahideen - and he remembers their methods, crudely-assembled roadside bombs destroying trucks.

Most of all he remembers being scared.

"I don't think there are people without fear unless they have mental problems. We were 18, and when we got there, we were scared. There is a different soil, a different smell of the air,” he said.

But he also remembers being proud of the war they were fighting - a pride, he says, that must be absent now in the Russian soldiers currently fighting in Ukraine.

"We were young and beautiful then. It was an honour to participate in defending the borders of the USSR,” Cibuc said.

"I see no honour for the Russians now fighting in Ukraine. I think they realise what they are doing and where they have been sent. In this war, Russians kill Russians.”

Mihail Carp, another veteran, was 28 when he was sent to Afghanistan in 1985. Unlike others, he had volunteered to fight after serving in Germany and Turkmenistan. He fought there until the end of the war in 1988 when the Soviet Union withdrew from the country.

At one point during the war, his convoy was ambushed by the mujahideen.

“I was in an