Lyudmila Malinina’s voice trembled as she described the
secret funeral she witnessed on a recent night in her small town of
Sudislavsky in the Kostroma region of central Russia. At about 8pm, a
truck parked at the cemetery a few yards away from her wooden house. The
truck’s headlights stayed on to illuminate the ground for several men
to hurriedly dig the grave, “as if they were thieves hiding something”,
Luydmila says.
More neighbours popped out of their
windows and doors to watch and discuss the strange scene, wondering why
anybody would bury a relative at this hour. Besides, that part of the
graveyard was reserved for the deceased in war, as somebody pointed out.
While
Nato sat down for a summit to decide what to do about the war in
Ukraine, and Vladimir Putin negotiated a ceasefire deal with Kiev,
Russian society recoiled from reports about secret funerals of soldiers
killed in Ukraine: missing sons, calls from husbands begging their wives
to save them from battle, bodies with missing limbs arriving in
coffins to Nizhny Novgorod, Orenburg, Pskov, Murmansk, Dagestan and
other regions of Russia. The death toll for Russian soldiers jumped to
more than 200 soldiers in a few days, between August 12th and September
2nd, in a war that was, officially, not happening.
newsweek source
Russian army wives have a special term for dead
soldiers returning home from the front lines in zinc coffins: they are
called “cargo 200” – a phrase that has echoed like a curse to a Russian
ear since the days that a tide of zinc packages came in from Afghanistan
during the Soviet war of 1980s. The secrecy around their husbands’
deployments “was like a trap created by a schizophrenic”, one of the
Kostroma paratroopers’ wives says.
One of the soldier
contractors, who served in Ukraine, described “the longest August” of
his life on the front, in a phone interview with Newsweek. What
was the worst part? Wounded friends dying in Rostov hospitals; the men
in zinc, the “200s” being sent home, and a high risk of becoming one.
“When we were on the train to Rostov last month, I had no idea we were
to go to Ukraine; we all believed they brought us to a base for the
usual routine exercises. If I knew it was for war, I’d have quit back in
Kostroma, as I have two little children at home,” the paratrooper of
the 331st regiment of Russia’s 98th Guards Airborne Division, says.
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