by Michele Farina
Few official figures and many burials. With the last farewell to the state, the secret services are demanding more budget: the money is not enough for all the corpses
More money for funerals, tombstones, medals, flags on coffins: the secret services have asked the Kremlin to increase the death toll. 17% more is needed to bury the fallen, according to a document quoted by Reuters news agency a few days ago. The Federal Security Service (FSB), the heir to the KGB, has demanded that the figure for each body be raised to a maximum of 74,200 rubles for the most senior officers.
Accounting and State Secrets
This exact death book keeping stands in contrast to the secret about the exact number of the dead. The official toll has been standing still for weeks: almost 1,400 dead, according to the Ministry of Defence. A report by the independent site Mediazona documents 1,744 soldiers and 317 officers killed. The Ukrainian government speaks of 20,000, for NATO it could be 15,000 (as many as the USSR lost in ten years of conflict in Afghanistan). President Zelenskyy said at the beginning of the war that the invaders used mobile cremators to make the dead disappear “so as not to let Russian women know that their children were being sent to Ukraine to die”. Kyiv claims to have accumulated thousands of bodies of Russian soldiers left in the cold stores by retreating comrades.
Two mothers
Gulnara Valiyeva, 43, buried her son Yevgeny, who was killed in combat along with his Belgian shepherd in Hostomel, near Kyiv. On social networks, the Russian mother urges the army to go “all the way”, and for herself she only asks about the puppy that her son is training. Another story, another anger accompanies Tatyana Kolodiy: her Vadim, 19, a sniper, is burned alive in an armored car. She also wrote on social media: “I can’t sleep, I can’t eat. Around me I see all these forty year olds joking and drinking beer while there the children are dying ».
The roses of the authorities
Tatyana does not speak of “heroes”. She is not a “good Russian citizen”: the authorities pay for the funeral, but demand restraint and subservience from her family. Journalists are kept away from cemeteries. And then it’s in the local media, on social networks like Vkontakte, where the news is filtered or the tributes to the “new heroes” are pouring. We don’t pretend the army is a walk in the park like we did in the beginning. Too many days have passed, too many dead. And so the strategy has changed a bit. The fallen are here. And they have to be celebrated. Sometimes the high heads of the local authorities drop by and place roses on the coffin of those who have “sacrificed themselves for their country”.
From the fringes of the Empire
At funerals, mothers hold up photos of twenty-year-old soldiers, and even the first ten Russians the Ukrainian authorities have identified among Bucha’s torturers have beardless faces. Putin’s “heroes” did not come from Moscow, but from the poorest areas of Greater Russia. Dagestan, Kalmykia or Buryatia, where the average salary is 44,000 rubles (less than 500 euros). The uniform as a source of food for the whole family or to nourish the dream of one’s own home: Bulat Odoev was killed outside of Kyiv, seven thousand kilometers from his homeland, in the Buryatia of the Buddhist shamans. “Our boys are dying,” the sister-in-law ventured to tell the Guardian. “This bloodbath has to stop.”
April 30, 2022 (Change April 30, 2022 | 23:35)
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