- By Markus Urban
- Diplomatic and Defense Editor, Newsnight
1 hour ago
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331st Regiment on the parade ground
Kostroma isn’t a bad place to look for the Ukraine war’s impact on Russia. For this city is home to a famous regiment that bears his name and which spearheaded all the main battles in the Kremlin’s campaign against its neighbors.
The 331st Guards Parachute Regiment, often referred to as the Kostroma Airborne Regiment, has been the subject of BBC Newsnight investigations since shortly after the invasion last February. These have revealed the price paid by the regiment and its home community. We had confirmed 39 deaths by April last year, 62 by the end of July, and now the toll has reached 94.
Much of the work in compiling this list was combing through social media accounts on V’Kontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook, and local media reports. We can then match this to satellite and Google Street View imagery.
A video discovered on V’Kontakte showed soldiers’ graves in a cemetery northeast of Kostroma. The graves shown in the videos match the names of the soldiers that we have collected.
Image source, Pervaya Pelosa
The actual number of 331 dead is probably much higher. Some of the soldiers hail from towns outside of Kostroma, which makes tracking down information about them much more difficult. Several soldiers have been reported missing – some of them could be among the dead.
If you look at the seriously wounded or prisoners, it is reasonable to assume that the Ukraine war cost the regiment several hundred soldiers.
The loss of life has drawn much attention in Kostroma, which is about 300 km northeast of Moscow and has a population of about a quarter of a million. A local website noted last spring that the entire Soviet-Afghan War, which lasted nine years, had cost the city 56 soldiers. Heavy casualties in Ukraine have presented local authorities with a difficult task of political management.
Sergey Sitnikov, the Kremlin-appointed governor of Kostroma, has spearheaded attempts to persuade people that the city’s soldiers are being properly supported. Gov. Sitnikov’s visits to hospitals, barracks and even to the front were reported on local television.
Visiting the front lines in December, Gov Sitnikov told viewers that “we have to help [the] Guys so they have decent terms.” He had brought crowdfunded care packages and commercially sold drones.
Gov Sitnikov is Vladimir Putin’s placeholder in his home region, so he’s hardly a rebel or fearless teller of uncomfortable truths. But his willingness to go to the front lines and admit shortcomings, even in cryptic terms, stands in interesting contrast to his boss.
When local television showed mobilized paratroopers on the parade ground of the 331st six months ago, it also brought them Governor Sitnikov’s rather candid remarks: “I wish you good health, success, completion of all tasks … and that you return home alive. ”
Image source, GTRK Kostroma
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Sergei Sitnikov, governor of Kostroma
The call-up of paratroopers, part of Russia’s broader mobilization, underscores the extent to which the campaign in Ukraine has exhausted the country’s professional army, of which the 331st was a showpiece. Footage from the November parade showed 150 conscripts before they were dispatched to the front.
The total size of the 331st Regiment could be estimated at between 1,500 and 1,700. When it first deployed to Ukraine in February 2022, it deployed two battalion groups totaling 1,000 to 1,200 troops. After suffering heavy casualties in a failed attempt to reach Kiev, the regiment was withdrawn and rebuilt in the southern Russian garrison town of Belgorod last summer.
In subsequent actions, the regiment moved around all major trouble spots – Izyum in early summer, Kherson later, and now back to the Donbass. By monitoring the dates given in Kostroma’s social media obituaries, it is possible to find out when (and often where) the unit was used to spearhead attacks, and the pauses when it was removed from line to complete its to lick wounds. For example, a string of fatalities in February indicates that elements of the 331st are engaged in Kreminna.
Mark Urban reports how the Russian 331st Regiment and their families are coping with Vladimir Putin’s long war
Each time casualty replacements – including the conscripts shown on TV in November – are used to replace casualties, the original roster of soldiers shrinks and the overall size of the unit decreases. At the front it can now be no more than 300-400.
The losses, and indeed the return of badly wounded men, have resonated in the home community. A few weeks after the start of the war, a V’Kontake user exclaimed: “Photos of our Kostroma boys are published almost every day. It sends shivers down my spine. What’s up? When will this end?
Local media published commemorations for fallen Kostroma soldiers. In December, a television channel showed the unveiling of a plaque commemorating Eduard Reunov, a paratrooper with the 331st who was killed in Ukraine. The style of this monument and the language used in the report can be seen as an attempt to canalize the Great Patriotic War (as the Russians call their 1941-1945 struggle against the Nazis), implying that today’s soldiers are commemorating an equally important one engage thing .
Image source, GTRK Kostroma
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Local television shows the unveiling of a memorial plaque for Eduard Reunov
But on social media we have found more modern manifestations of remembrance and even people looking for revenge. Soldiers are shown holding grenades with messages scrawled on them from Reunov’s former classmates and allegedly his family.
There is a trend in some Russian garrison towns for wives and mothers to post pictures of themselves with a soldier’s uniform absent. A crying mother of a dead paratrooper from the 331st recalls the Great Patriotic War, adding: “I hope stories about our boys will be written.”
Image source, GTRK Kostroma
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The wife of a Russian soldier poses with his uniform
Anyone who questions the sacrifice tends to be neglected. “Ukraine is not my homeland, our boys die in vain,” someone recently wrote on Kostroma’s V’Kontakte page. Another was quick to reply, “That’s a stupid opinion. There’s no point in writing this stuff here.”
From the coverage of Governor Sitnikov’s activities, it appears that the authorities are trying to placate those who are worried about the dead and wounded. It’s not clear how much support the war has from the broader Russian public, but the video we saw suggests there is a good level of solidarity among military families in Kostroma.
The decline of the 331st can also be gauged by the loss of machinery and personnel – particularly airborne infantry fighting vehicles known by the Russian initials BMD – used up in successive battles.
When the 331st was part of an Airborne Forces task force advancing on Kiev, we initially had trouble identifying their vehicles in videos of the fighting. A painted “V” was used to identify units of all the different units in this task force, and an inverted triangle symbol with a “3” in the center was used by another regiment besides the 331st.
As the fighting continued, the soldiers of the 331st added another ad hoc marking to the V on the sides of their vehicles – an exclamation mark painted next to the V. They may have done this precisely so their commanders could distinguish their armor from the other regiments’.
Consequently, we were able to identify individual BMDs from the 331st that were loaded onto railroad cars in March 2022 after their departure from Ukraine. They then reappeared during last summer’s fighting in Donbass.
Open-source analysts have also identified at least 25 destroyed BMDs marked in this way by combing Ukrainian military social media accounts. As with the dead soldiers, this visible loss does not represent the total, as many other BMDs of the Kostroma Regiment were probably lost out of sight of the Ukrainian troops.
A report broadcast by Russian broadcaster NTV in February 2023 shows a “tank group” of the 331st deployed in Luhansk. But it only confirms the impression we got from other sources that the regiment survives as small detachments capable of leading specific missions. Judging by the callsigns seen on camera, this element consists of just three BMD armored vehicles.
Image source, WarSpotting
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Destroyed BMDs of the 331st Regiment
So the long war of the regiment continues. You will learn little about the far-reaching effects of the war on the Ukrainian people from the Russian media, and there is no overt coverage of war crimes allegations either.
The 331st was accused of massacring hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers during fighting in 2014. To many Ukrainians, recent Russian casualties seem like nothing more than the paratroopers getting their just desserts.
Meanwhile, in the Kostroma cemetery, there is ample evidence of the cost of the Russian invasion’s failure. Also buried is the regiment’s reputation as “the best of the best” and its dreams of easy victory.
Additional research Maria Jevstajeva and Louis Harris-White