As Russia’s covert war against Ukraine is becoming more obvious, more and more Russians are beginning to realize that their relatives are fighting against the Ukrainian army, and that brings disappointment and disillusion to some of them.
While previously Russia mostly sent fighters who had been formally discharged from the military or on official leave, earlier this week an invasion of eastern Ukraine by the regular Russian army began, making it much harder to hide the truth. The sight of coffins coming from eastern Ukraine is already triggering some public discontent.
As the war has escalated, civic groups of soldiers’ mothers have become more vocal in their criticism of the Russian government.
On Aug. 26 Ella Polyakova, head of the St. Petersburg Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, said that hospitals in Rostov-on-Don and nearby regions were filled with injured soldiers.
Valentina Melnikova, head of the Union of the Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers, said on Aug. 27 that about 15,000 Russian soldiers, including both mercenaries and the regular army, were currently fighting in eastern Ukraine. She lambasted the authorities for hiding the truth and effectively denying assistance to the killed soldiers’ families, comparing it to similar situations during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the first Chechen War.
On Aug. 27, the Stavropol Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers published a list of 400 killed and injured Russian troops.
Natalya Zhukova, head of the Nizhny Novgorod Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, told the Kyiv Post by phone that the group had received appeals by people who suspected that their relatives were fighting in Ukraine. The committee has sent requests to the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office regarding that issue, she added.
However, Russian authorities have been unhelpful, and it is very difficult to confirm such information, Zhukova said.
“There is disinformation from both sides, and it’s hard to make sense of this mess,” she said.
The committees of soldiers’ mothers stepped up their activities after the capture of 10 Russian paratroopers in the village of Dzerkalny in the Donetsk Oblast by the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, on Aug. 25. Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted on Aug. 26 that Russian paratroopers had been captured in Ukraine but claimed that they had crossed the border “by accident.”
The SBU published videos in which four people identifying themselves as paratroopers of the 98th division, based in the Kostroma and Ivanovo oblasts, explain that they had been told they would participate in military exercises. The paratroopers were sent across the border to Ukraine and realized that they were not in Russia only when they got shot at, they said.
“Now I understand that we were sent to fight people we shouldn’t have been fighting,” said Ivan Romantsov, deputy commander of a military vehicle. “I want to inform the government that they should reconsider their worldview, that here there are normal people who also want to go home to their families. They just want to raise their children with their wives, not wage war here.”
He said it would have been impossible for his company to get lost and cross the border by accident.
“They’re sending us here without informing and explaining why – like cannon fodder,” Romantsov said. “I can’t explain and understand it.”
In a video published on YouTube on Aug. 26, the paratroopers called on their relatives to help release them.
The mothers of some of the captured soldiers published a YouTube video on Aug. 26, urging Putin and the government to help their sons.
“In the name of Christ, I beg you: give me back my child, return him alive,” said Olga Garina, one of the mothers. “And all the other boys who are with him in captivity.”
Another scandal was triggered by the burial of soldiers of the Pskov-based 76th paratrooper division in the village of Vybuty near Pskov on Aug. 25.Ukrainian and Russian opposition media have published a good deal of evidence intended to prove that the paratroopers had been killed in Ukraine.
On Aug. 27 relatives of the paratroopers told RBC, a Russian news agency, that the commanders of their military unit had told them that the soldiers had crossed the border and started a fight with Ukrainian troops “by accident.”
Vladimir Romensky, a journalist at Dozhd television, and Ilya Vasyunin, a reporter at the Russkaya Planeta news site, were attacked by unknown men when they attended the funeral in Vybuty. The attackers threw rocks at their car, and subsequently two other men threatened to kill them unless they leave Pskov.
The Kremlin’s critics blamed the attack on Russian authorities’ efforts to conceal the evidence of their participation in the war in eastern Ukraine.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected].
