Ludmila Hohlova, chairwoman of the Kostroma Board of Soldiers’ Mothers, gestures on Aug. 28 near a checkpoint of the Russian paratroopers’ base in Kostroma, some 350 kilometers outside Moscow.
MOSCOW, Sept 12, 2014 (Reuters) - Late last month Yelena Tumanova was handed the body of her son in a coffin at her home in Russia's Western Volga region. Anton Tumanov was 20 and a soldier serving in the Russian army in the North Caucasus region of Chechnya.
The documents Yelena Tumanova was given with the body raised more questions than they answered - questions about how her son died and about the Russian government's denials that its troops are in Ukraine. The records do not show Anton Tumanov's place of death, said human rights activists who spoke to his mother after she got in touch with them.
"Medical documents said there were shrapnel wounds, that is he died from a loss of blood, but how it happened and where were not indicated," said Sergei Krivenko, who heads a commission on military affairs on Russia's presidential human rights council.
Yelena Tumanova could not be reached for comment and Reuters was unable to review the documents. But more than 10 soldiers in her dead son's unit told Krivenko and Ella Polyakova, another member of the presidential human rights council, that Anton Tumanov died in an Aug. 13 battle near the Ukrainian town of Snizhnye. The battle, the soldiers said, killed more than 100 Russian soldiers serving in the 18th motorised rifle brigade of military unit 27777, which is based outside the Chechen capital of Grozny.
Rolan, 23, a fellow soldier who served with Tumanov, told Reuters that his comrade died on the operating table after he was hit by shrapnel from rockets. Rolan said he was steps away in an armoured personnel carrier when the rockets struck. He said two in his group died, including another soldier, named Robert.
"I was inside an APC, hatches were open, and as a result I was lightly stunned and shell-shocked," said Rolan.
"Robert and Anton were outside two or three steps away and they simply did not manage to hide. Robert died right there. We gave first aid to Anton, he was already on the operating table when he died," said Rolan, now at home in Russia's Krasnodar region where he is recovering from an injury.
Human rights workers and military workers say some 15 other Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine, with hundreds more now in hospital.
The fact that Russian soldiers have died in a war in which they officially have no involvement is a problem in Russia. Chatter about young soldiers returning home in coffins has begun to spread over the past few weeks. Though still limited, such talk has powerful echoes of earlier Russian wars such as Chechnya and Afghanistan.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said this week that Russia had moved most of its forces back across the border into Russian territory after a ceasefire between Kiev and the separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. But a NATO military officer said on Thursday that Russia still had 1,000 troops in the country.
The idea of an outright invasion of eastern Ukraine by Russian troops is highly unpopular in Russia. A survey by pro-Kremlin pollster Fund of Social Opinions said 57 percent of Russians support the separatist Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics, but only 5 percent support an invasion of Ukrainian territory.
Russian authorities have worked to systematically silence rights workers' complaints over soldiers' deaths, intimidating those who question the Kremlin's denials that its soldiers are in Ukraine.
Krivenko and Polyakova, who is also the head of an organisation representing soldiers' mothers in St. Petersburg, filed a petition on Aug. 25 asking Russian investigators for an explanation for the deaths at Snizhnye.
So far they have heard nothing. But soon after the petition was filed to the Investigative Committee, a law enforcement body that answers only to President Vladimir Putin, Polyakova was told her organisation, which has existed since the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union, had been branded a 'foreign agent.'
The term, brought in by Putin in 2012 to set apart non-governmental organisations that receive foreign funding and engage in political activities, carries no real punitive measures but is often used to discredit critics of the Kremlin.
Polyakova says she has been at odds with the authorities over her stance toward Russia's annexation of Crimea. She believes authorities gave her the 'foreign agent' tag because of her petition and an Aug. 28 interview with Reuters in which she first accused Moscow of covering up the deaths of Russian soldiers.
"It's all linked. This was just the last drop, so to speak," she said.
SERVING IN UKRAINE
Officially there have been no Russian soldiers in Ukraine. But Kiev maintains that Russian troops have in the past few weeks helped separatists reverse the tide of the conflict, pushing Ukrainian forces back from the Russian border and allowing the separatists access to the sea.
And Reuters was able to find people who know of hundreds of soldiers injured in Ukraine, or whose relatives are fighting in Ukraine, building up the most comprehensive picture yet of Russian battlefield casualties in the country.
A military doctor told Reuters that hundreds of Russian soldiers injured in fighting in eastern Ukraine are now in military hospitals in the regions of Moscow, St. Petersburg and Rostov, which borders Ukraine.
"Generally they bring (the injured) to Rostov and to Moscow," he said.
Sergei Kozlov, an IT specialist in Moscow, says his nephew Nikolai, a paratrooper based in Ulianovsk, was sent to Ukraine on Aug. 24. He was hit by a shell after he crossed the border, Sergei Kozlov said, and lost his leg.
"He was operated on in Rostov Province and then was brought to Moscow because there was no more room there. But even now there is no room in Moscow hospitals or in St. Petersburg because they're all filled with people injured in Ukraine," Sergei Kozlov said by phone. Nikolai, who Sergei said is still in hospital, could not be reached.
A cab driver in Moscow who gave his name as Vitaly said his son was also sent to Ukraine. He has a picture on his dashboard of the 20-year-old boy smiling atop an armoured personnel carrier.
Vitaly says he is furious that his son - a paratrooper based in Pskov near Estonia - has been sent to Ukraine to fight for the rebels.
"They sent him there illegally to fight for the rebels two weeks ago. He says he'll be back on Nov. 20. I'm counting the days," he said.
Vitaly says officers tried to force his son - serving mandatory military service - to change his status to a contract soldier, which would legally allow him to serve abroad. Conscripts in Russia are exempt from foreign service.
His son refused to sign, but officers sent him to Ukraine anyway.
"They dressed him up like a rebel so no one would know he was a Russian soldier and off he went," said Vitaly.
Rolan, the serviceman who fought alongside Tumanov in Snizhnye, says he spent 10 days fighting in Ukraine in the middle of August. Back home in the Krasnodar region, he said his commanders offered soldiers the option to go to Ukraine. The men could refuse, but the commanders were very supportive of those who agreed. Rolan went, he said, because of his military oath and to protect Russian-speakers from Ukrainian forces, routinely referred to as fascists, in Russia. His unit put him on paid leave to make the trip.
"(I wanted) to push neo-Nazis and pure fascists deep into the country or eliminate them and to free Russian-speaking population of this evil," he said.
He said he crossed into Ukraine in a truck without a licence plate.
"On the Ukrainian side of the border, rebels met and guided us. In fact there is no border, just a field of sunflowers. There is Russia on one side of it and on the other side there is no more Russia."
"NO RELATION TO REALITY"
Independent Russian news outlet Dozhd has tried to keep a list of the Russian soldiers injured, detained or killed in Ukraine.
But the number of Russian soldiers serving on the side of pro-Russian rebels against Ukrainian troops is unknown.
Russia's defence ministry strongly denied reports that Russian military units were operating in Ukraine.
"We have noticed the launch of this informational 'canard' and are obliged to disappoint its overseas authors and their few apologists in Russia," a ministry official, General-Major Igor Konashenkov, told Interfax news agency.
"The information contained in this material bears no relation to reality."
A Facebook page called "Cargo 200," the Soviet term for the bodies of soldiers sent home from war, is also trying to protest at the use of Russian soldiers in Ukraine and connect soldiers and parents to better understand how their children died.
Yelena Vasilyeva, who helps organise the group, blamed Russia's Federal Security Services, the successor agency of the Soviet KGB, for hacking attacks.
"Our group is suffering attacks most likely from the Federal Security Services since Aug. 20. On the site it's been going on for five days," she said.
Krivenko, of the presidential human rights council, said Russia's failure to admit that its soldiers are in Ukraine is part of a long tradition of hiding military activities or playing them down, as in the first war in Chechnya.
"When the Chechen War began, it also started out without a declaration of war. And Russian soldiers participated in secret until troops were officially sent in Nov. 1994. Until then, they took off their uniforms and entered the conflict as volunteers," Krivenko said in his office at Moscow-based rights group Memorial.
"Everyone understood that there was war going on there but everyone tried to hide it in every possible way," he said.
Russia's secret funerals become more and more often.
COVERING TRACES
Rights activists and their lawyers say the biggest difference between the first Chechen War in the 1990s and now is that Russian authorities have become better at stopping information they don't like.
In the northwest Russian city of Pskov, reporters were chased away from a cemetery in late August where, according to accounts on social media, two Russian paratroopers killed in Ukraine are secretly buried.
On Aug. 21, Ukrainian journalist Roman Bochkala published on his Facebook page what he said were photographs of Russian documents recovered after Ukrainian forces clashed with an armoured column of pro-Russian rebels near the village of Heorhiivka, eastern Ukraine.
The photographs show a passport in the name of a 21-year-old man called Nikolai Krygin issued in the Pskov region. There was also an insurance certificate, also issued in Pskov, and a copy of the military rule-book for Russian Airborne Troops. Reuters was unable to locate Krygin.
Pskov is the hometown of the 76th division of the Russian Airborne Troops. Its base is a few kilometres from the cemetery.
A Russian politician told Reuters he was badly beaten by unknown assailants after publicising the funerals of the paratroopers in Pskov.
"There is a weaker civil society now. Now the entire system is closed. In a closed system, what happens covers the entire system, investigators, doctors," said Polyakova.
Vitaly Cherkasov, a human rights lawyer, said that authorities are using threats and administrative punishments - like 'foreign agent' status - to keep people from talking. But even with that pressure, information spreads.
Yulia Ganiyeva, 22, received a phone call from an anonymous officer on Sept. 4, informing her of the death of her fiance Alexei Zasov, 22, who served in the 31st paratroopers brigade in Ulianovsk, Vladimir Lenin's home town on the Volga river.
"They officially said that he was killed on Russian territory but the truth is that he was killed in Ukraine," she said.
"I got in touch with soldiers who served with him. They told me he was killed in Ukraine."
The Guardian: 12. September 2014
Despair in Luhansk as residents count the dead
By Shaun Walker from Luhansk
Coffins prepared for burial outside the morgue in Luhansk.
Each time a body arrives, Anatoly Turevich opens a file on his computer and adds to his list. Often the only detail he is able to add is "man" or "woman". There are 511 entries. Turevich, the 62-year-old director of Luhansk's main morgue, has seen a lot in his three decades of work, but the past few months have been more grisly even than the mining accidents he was used to.
Luhansk, a town of more than 400,000 inhabitants, has been the worst-hit city in east Ukraine during the recent conflict. Capital of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic, the city spent more than a month encircled by Ukrainian forces. As battles raged between local rebels, with Russian support, and the Ukrainian army and volunteer battalions, more than half the city fled, to relatives in other cities or refugee camps in Russia. Those who stayed were generally those too frail to move or those with absolutely nowhere to go.
Turevich picks a number at random, launching a series of photographs of blackened remains that bear only a passing resemblance to the human form. Relatives of the missing can flick through the gruesome catalogue and see if they recognise their loved ones. If a body is too disfigured for photographic identification, the morgue has taken DNA samples, though it has no ability to analyse them. At some point in the future, they will be sent somewhere that does, Turevich hopes.
Of the seven specialists at the morgue, five left when the fighting started, while the sixth drove over a mine on his way to work, and is now in hospital. That left Turevich to handle the influx of corpses on his own.
"I could have left, but then who would do this work?" he asks, before cutting the interview short. A van carrying 15 decaying bodies has just arrived. They have been dead for weeks, but the roads were far too dangerous for their relatives to transport them. The list will now total 526. Turevich says the vast majority are civilians, and almost all have died from shrapnel wounds.
After a fragile ceasefire between Ukrainian and rebel forces agreed last week, people are finally able to bring out their dead. Turevich expects many more busy days in the near future.
In the courtyard, more than 50 wooden coffins are neatly stacked under a cloud of flies. All are full; sometimes a chunk of yellowed torso or bloodied clothing is visible through the gap between lid and casket. A generator now works intermittently, keeping the bodies inside the morgue partially refrigerated. For much of August there was no power at all. "People think we must get used to the smell," says Turevich, whose office is also infested with flies. "You never get used to the smell."
Post-apocalyptic
The ceasefire agreed a week ago has meant the shelling has ceased for the first time in two months. A semblance of normality is returning to the city. At its vast locomotive factory, closed after shells landed inside its territory, there is hope that work might start up again as early as Monday. In the basement training room, which has served as a makeshift bomb shelter for more than 100 people, only five were left on Wednesday, the rest having returned home as the explosions finally stopped.
But there is a long way to go. Luhansk has a post-apocalyptic feel, as people stumble into the brightness from the bomb shelters, and thousands of those who left arrive back on buses, their possessions bundled into large bags. There are few cars, as petrol is scarce, so many people are on bicycles or trudging long distances on foot.
Lyubov Zheleznyak near a house cellar where a brother and sister, Vitaly and Marina Yushko, burned to death in early August.
There has been no water or electricity in the city for more than a month. Almost every cafe and restaurant has been shuttered for weeks. At the few open stalls, people wait in snaking bread queues for the first time in two decades. They draw water from wells; on street corners generators are hooked up to a spaghetti of wires from which mobile phones can be charged. To actually make a call, they have to find one of the few isolatedspots on the city outskirts where one bar of reception is available. There, dozens of people gather waving their phones in the air as if in a bizarre ritual, hoping to get a signal and finally make contact with relatives who worry they may be dead.
In the suburb of Yubileynoe, 90 residential apartment blocks suffered some kind of damage in recent months, while 16 took direct hits. It is unclear who will pay for the huge structural repair work required. The residents certainly cannot afford it, the local rebel government has not offered, and Kiev has no control over the territory. Their best hope for now appears to be a volunteer group using equipment from the local coal mine.
"The aim of the Ukrainian army was to destroy everything, so that people would be on their knees and beg to be allowed to return to the fascist Ukrainian state," says 47-year-old Vyacheslav Pleskach, a rights activist who is now volunteering to help those whose houses were damaged in Yubileynoe. "There was nothing of military value here at all, nothing. They were just shelling the most vulnerable people, day and night."
Others note that the rebels would often wheel artillery to positions in residential areas, fire at Ukrainian positions outside the town, and speed off. By the time the return fire came, the rebels were long gone and civilian homes suffered. Viktor, who sent his wife to Kiev but refused to leave the flat in central Luhansk he had worked so hard to buy, claims often the rebels themselves would fire at residential areas.
"Once there was just a few seconds between the outgoing sound of mortar fire and the explosion," he says, from the small candlelit apartment he could not bear to leave. "It came from very close. It had to come from within the city, which means the rebels."
Amid the passions, rumours and disinformation, understanding who shot where and when is extremely difficult. But there seems little doubt that both sides are responsible for civilian casualties, and by firing on civilian areas, Ukrainian forces have made any eventual process of reintegration even harder, as anger grows.
Viktor in the apartment in Luhansk he refused to leave.
In the suburb of Bolshaya Verkhunka, the devastation is absolute. After a battle in early August, the Ukrainian National Guard took up a position on one side of the suburb; the rebels were on the other. Each side relentlessly attacked the other, over the heads of the residents. Almost every house on the main street is destroyed.
In the house 65-year-old Nikolai Zapasny built with his own hands between 1975 and 1981, some of the walls are missing, much of the roof has gone, and all the windows broken. The interiors, painstakingly decorated in a chintzy manner unthinkably luxurious for such a locale, have been destroyed by shrapnel; the walls turned into Swiss cheese. "I always wanted these sofas. Look how nice they were, and now look at them," says his wife, tearfully. "We hadn't even paid off the loan."
His beloved car, a sky-blue Volga 21, kept in mint condition for three decades, is now a tangle of gnarled metal; even his bicycle is destroyed. For two months, he and his wife have been cowering in a dank basement as the house above them was slowly pulverised. "Both sides were shooting, all the time. Nobody from either side ever came in to ask us who was living here. They would have found no bandits, just old people." Zapasny's wife sobs uncontrollably, while he simply stares into the middle distance, unable to comprehend how his entire life's work has been shot to pieces.
"We don't care what country we live in. We just want them to stop killing us," says their 58-year-old neighbour Lyubov Zheleznyak, a widow. Her house was relatively unscathed, but is still riddled with bullets and all her windows are blown out. Pensions have not been paid for months; she has no money for food, let alone repair works.
Further down the road, Vitaly and Marina Yushko, a brother and sister both in their early 30s, were hiding from the shelling in their cellar in early August when the house took a direct hit. Rubble fell over the entrance to the cellar, jamming it shut, while flames engulfed the remains of the house. Unable to escape, the pair burned to death.
It was not possible to move the bodies because of the constant fire, so the neighbours buried the charred remains of Vitaly and Marina in a shallow grave in their back garden. Nobody informed the authorities, as there was no way to make contact with them, a sign that the real death toll could be much higher than the numbers given at the morgue.
After a sustained battle a week ago, the National Guard fled the area, part of a broad and bloody Ukrainian retreat Kiev says was spurred by the rebels gaining an injection of Russian firepower. Evidence of the retreat is visible on the roads out of Luhansk. Burnt-out armoured personnel carriers and tanks stand at regular intervals on the road. At Lutuhyne, more than 20 vehicles were incinerated by artillery and Grad rockets, their twisted and blackened remains now picked over by children scavenging for scrap metal.
Nikita, 10, plays with a burned rifle at a site where a Ukrainian military convoy was destroyed.
'Our hearts ache with despair'
Nobody in Luhansk knows what the future holds. Many people do not want to talk about politics. Nobody knows whether in six months' time they will be part of Ukraine or part of a breakaway state, and there could be recriminations for calling it the wrong way and backing one side. Meanwhile, people try as hard as possible to pretend that everything is fine.
"Parents see the schools opening, and it gives them the impression that everything is all right; it helps them," says Valentina Kiyashko, the city's director of education, an imposing yet kindly matriarch with a shock of peroxide hair and an implacable manner. "I behave as if everything is normal because people know me and they like to see that everything is fine. But of course inside it's hard. Everything feels constantly shaken up."
She herself has been sleeping on the floor of the bathroom or in the entrance hall to her flat; as has her 86-year-old mother. Several times shells landed in the courtyard of her apartment block.
Of more than 60 schools in Luhansk, only six have opened. Some have been severely damaged, in others there are simply no children as they have all been evacuated. All the teachers who were asked to report for the new school year have done so, despite the fact that none have received a salary for the past three months.
At an annual competition for singing, dancing and painting among the city's different schools, the turnout is less than a quarter of last year's, but everyone is determined to put on a show despite the circumstances. A dance ensemble is decked out in matching blue uniforms; a young girl with her hair tied in ribbons valiantly battles her way through a violin sonata.
Pupils from different schools at a singing and dancing competition in Luhansk.
The festivities are interrupted by a poem written and performed by the adult son of the headmistress, stanzas of shrieked anguish and raw emotion about hearing a Grad rocket attack, the imprecise launchers that hail down up to 40 rockets in one salvo.
"Our hearts ache with despair … There is no earth, there is no sky … Grad! Grad! Grad!"
The children look on in shock while most of the teachers are choked with tears.
In Luhansk, emotions are never far beneath the surface. A teacher begins sobbing at the question of whether the region should stay part of Ukraine or separate; another cannot bear to talk about one of her students, whose parents drove over a mine in their car. His mother died instantly; the child's legs were blown off and he later died in hospital.
In a scruffy field not far from the morgue, there are mounds of freshly dug black earth, dozens of simple wooden crosses with plyboard signs; names and dates of birth scrawled in black marker. Protective gloves and masks, worn by the gravediggers, are discarded in the grass. The lonely silence is broken periodically by low booms from the airport; rebels exploding ordnance left behind by the Ukrainian army when they fled.
There are men, women, pensioners, children. Many simply have "unknown" and a number; some day perhaps relatives will recognise a body on Turevich's list and match it with the number on the grave. A huge, open trench is partially filled with coffins; a dozen of them arranged in a neat line. There is space for many more.
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