Poverty Not Heroism Created Russia’s ‘Village of Military Glory’

The governor of Russia’s far eastern region of Kamchatka Krai, Vladimir Solodov, has declared his intention to make the tiny village of Sedanka Russia’s first “Village of Military Glory” – in recognition of the fact that half of its men went to serve in President Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation.”

Of the 67 males over the age of 18, 39 reportedly volunteered to fight in the war against Ukraine – with at least five having died on the front line. Solodov wrote on his Telegram channel on Monday: “I believe that the memory of these villagers’ heroism should be preserved forever.” He declared that Sedanka’s menfolk had “risen to defend the Motherland,” adding that his proposal “will resonate in the heart of every Kamchatka resident.”

The reports from the independent Russian news outlet Meduza on Monday and the Kamchatka Life TV channel a year ago, which can be viewed below, cast a different perspective on the motivation of the villagers and highlight the governor’s call as obvious propaganda for himself and Russia’s role in the war in Ukraine.

Sedanka is in the northwest of the Kamchatka Peninsula, 6,350 kilometers (almost 4,000 miles) east of Moscow and about 500 kilometers (310 miles) from the regional capital Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky – a journey that takes 18 hours using a local airline because the one road between the two is only passable when it is frozen in the winter.

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Journalist and Kamchatka regional assembly deputy Alexandra Novikova, who made the 2024 TV film entitled it “Back to the Middle Ages,” having called Sedanka the most depressed place she’d ever seen. She said the predominantly indigenous Koryak or Itelmen residents of the village “have abandoned their traditional way of life and their culture – They are simply trying to survive.”

Novikova concluded that daily life in the village has “ground to a halt.” The reindeer that once were the lifeblood of the economy have all disappeared along with their other staple fishing – because so many able-bodied men had gone to war.

The images in her film showed all of the villages Soviet-era housing in a state of disrepair most “riddled with mold,” with the stench of decay everywhere and most lacking indoor toilets, running water or heating other than log burning stoves.

A similar bleak picture painted by Baikal 24 in April 2024 claiming the manpower situation was so bad that “there’s no one left to chop firewood,” sparked Solodov to say he had provided funding for a support program for Sedanka’s military families in 2025 – to implement agricultural work, firewood procurement, and repair the homes and roofs.

To date the only change, according to iStories has been the erection of a monument dedicated to the village’s “special military operation warriors” while none of the other promised improvements to their lives have yet to materialize.

The sorry state of the village is epitomized by Ria Novosti which reported that the population of Sedanka has almost halved from those 457 previously registered residents to around 250 now.