When Russian paratrooper Nikolai Kozlov was deployed to Crimea

When Russian paratrooper Nikolai Kozlov was deployed to Crimea to help Moscow take over the peninsula from Ukraine, his parents were proud of him.Six months later Kozlov is disabled for life, an amputee now recovering in hospital from wounds incurred on a Kremlin-orchestrated covert mission to Ukraine to prop up separatists fighting against Kiev.The paratrooper's uncle, Sergei Kozlov, said his brother asked him to help take care of the young man in the hospital."Seva called yesterday and said that Kolka had been wounded in Ukraine, and had lost a leg, or both legs -- I didn't ask," Kozlov said, referring to his brother and nephew by their nicknames.

Kozlov's written comments to AFP are part of an emerging trickle of first-hand accounts which -- along with secret burials -- are providing grim evidence of Russia's intervention in Ukraine amid a virtual blackout imposed by state television.The Committee of Soldiers' Mothers, the main rights group representing the military, has said up to 15,000 soldiers could have been sent into Ukraine over the past two months.An adviser to Ukraine's defence minister, Oleksandr Danylyuk, said on Facebook this week 2,000 Russian troops had been killed in Ukraine.President Vladimir Putin has denied Russian troops are in Ukraine. He said the handful of soldiers captured by Kiev authorities had wandered into the ex-Soviet country by accident.

On Wednesday Putin unveiled a seven-point plan to resolve the conflict in eastern Ukraine, and said a deal with Kiev could be signed as early as Friday.