Dear Russia. We need to talk. Your country’s leaders are keeping something from you. Something pretty big. They are covering up the numbers of your citizens who have been killed fighting in Ukraine.
Firstly, the role of Russian citizens in Ukraine has been masked, but not denied. Putin has talked about “volunteers, following the call of their hearts”, but this is untrue. While there may have been at some point a handful of such volunteers, their motivation coming from the toxic lies being told about Ukraine in state propaganda channels, the vast majority of those people who have been fighting in Ukraine are not volunteers, they are mercenaries. Nobody is putting their lives on the line for free, they’re willing to fight in and against Ukraine for money. The dire living conditions in Russia, created by the blatant theft of state resources, help to create the conditions for this to transpire.
Then there is the evidence of direct Russian military involvement in the war. When serving soldiers have been captured in Ukraine their presence on foreign soil has been dismissed as a mistake, “they got lost” Putin has claimed, in a pathetic deflection of the facts.
We know of stories of captured Russian soldiers being disowned by the Kremlin. That they, allegedly, withdrew from military service just before heading into Ukraine is another incredulous and ludicrous claim.
But beyond all of this smoke and mirrors, beyond the blatant lies, the real truth here is that Russian citizens have been dying in Ukraine in huge numbers over the last 5 years. Their corpses have been shipped back across the border to their homeland (the Donbas is not their homeland) in convoys marked with the term “Gruz 200”, a military call sign for transport carrying dead bodies.
We know, for a fact, that the Kremlin is terrified of the facts of Russian deaths becoming known in Russia, and we know this because we can see the extents to which the Kremlin has gone to cover up these details.
Russia’s war against Ukraine, today, is largely fought from trenches that resemble the trenches of World War I. But it has not always been so. We have seen the war, and the tactics with which it is fought, evolve. To highlight the vast number of casualties that Russia has suffered as a result of the evil that resides in the Kremlin, let’s look back to the fight (following the signing of the first Minsk “peace” deal, which Russia had no intention of ever abiding by) for Donetsk Airport.
Like most people here in Ukraine, I can count several of the cyborgs who defended Donetsk Airport as friends or acquaintances. Sitting with one of these friends one evening, I listened as he told me what the battle was like. “Imagine”, he told me, “this scenario. You’re sitting inside and defending a building. Before you, where the attackers are coming from, is a vast wide open space. Because, it’s an airport.” We have all looked out of the window of an airport terminal at some point. Envisioning this is not hard. My friend went on to tell me that in such a situation, attackers coming at you from open ground while you are firing from a position of cover, every single shot, almost, was a kill shot.
“On occasion,” this Cyborg continued, “the attackers would get close enough so that you could hear them.” And he explained to me that from the language they spoke, he knew many of the attackers were from Chechnya, a Russian Republic led by a warlord installed by Putin. Back in the Summer of 2014, when the war raged at its most fierce, footage of heavily-armed Chechen fighters arriving in Donetsk was released. Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, is 964 kilometers from Donetsk. Does anyone believe that truckloads of heavily armed men passed through almost 1,000 kilometers of
southern Russia without official sanction from the Russian government?
Many of those Chechen fighters went home in body bags, the loss of their lives easy to cover up for the Kremlin-installed warlord Kadyrov, who rules his fiefdom through fear. At one point, my Cyborg friend told me, there was a lull in fighting at the airport, requested by the Russian side, because they wanted to clean up the rotting carcasses of dead soldiers littering the apron, because the bodies were being eaten by packs of stray dogs. These were Russian citizens.
To prove the fact of the Russian death toll being, most likely, in the many thousands, we do not need to only rely on the anecdotal stories of a couple of my personal acquaintances. The evidence for this also lies in the attempts to cover up any investigation into it.
One group that has sought to find the truth about Russian deaths in Ukraine is the Union of Soldiers’ Mothers. After declaring, in August of 2014, that they believed 100 Russian soldiers being treated in a hospital in St. Petersburg had received their injuries in Ukraine (where else? Russia was not overtly present in Syria at the time) the group was labelled a “Foreign Agent” and the 73-year-old head of their office in the town of Budennovsk was arrested on trumped up fraud charges. Buddenovsk is home to a military airfield, it is also located along the route from Grozny to Rostov on Don, known to be the location of the largest military staging posts for Russia’s war against Ukraine.
By looking at events in another military city, Pskov, we can again see the cover up of military deaths, and the same efforts to intimidate anybody investigating this matter. Pskov is home to the 76th Guards Air Assault Division of the Russian Airborne Troops. When journalists from the local Pskovskaya Guberniya newspaper visited the graveyard of that city to investigate fresh graves, they were attacked. When BBC reporters tried to investigate the same, they, too, were attacked.
Journalists from one of the only independent media channels in Russia, TV Rain, also came under attack trying to investigate the graves in the Pskov cemetery, forcing them to turn around.
In the wake of reporting from the Pskov cemetery, markings from the graves were removed, this is one of Russia’s answers to the inconvenience of their war dead, to let them lie in unmarked graves. In an effort to further cover up the deaths of Russian citizens in Ukraine, a way in which no fresh graves can tell part of this story, Russia has been accused of callously burning the bodies of their war dead in mobile crematoriums on the Russian side of the border.
Away from the individual stories and the isolated example of Pskov, what might be the total number of Russian deaths in Ukraine? Russia analyst Paul Goble looked into this question in late 2016, Goble analysed the numbers of registered deaths in three oblasts (provinces) of Russia where there is a high concentration of military service folk in the population, and compared the number of deaths during the period of 2014 and 2015 to previously registered deaths during peacetime. The outcome of this research, using publicly available figures and looking at the regions of Voronezh, Nizhny
Novograd, and Krasnoyarsk, was that those three oblasts recorded 6,312 “excess” deaths in 2014 and 2015.
Recent analysis of the output of Russia’s domestic propaganda shows that the war rhetoric is increasing. It is likely that the Kremlin is laying foundational thinking for an escalation of the war in Ukraine, and it is not a coincidence that Putin’s popularity ratings have dipped of late. The people of Russia should know that any insurgence will come at a high price, in terms of the Russian lives that will be lost if Vladimir Putin decides to increase the ante. Indeed, Russian citizens need to know the full extent of losses already suffered as a result of the Kremlin’s war.
This is the Kremlin’s dirty secret. Many thousands of Russian citizens have lost their lives on the battlefields of the Donbas. Vladimir Putin sent them to their death, fighting in a war that he denies he is remotely involved in. The fact of these deaths exposes the fact of Russia’s obvious involvement in the war in eastern Ukraine, and exposes Putin’s lies.
