Mother of a Russian soldier killed in Syria fights for recognition as a soldier

The death of dozens of Russians in Syria on February 7 is not the first tragedy of this kind. In September 2017 alone, at least 54 soldiers from private military companies from Russia died there. The Russian Air Force service found this out by studying the history of one of the victims - Evgeny Alikov from the village of Severonezhsk in the Arkhangelsk region - and a package of documents that was brought to his mother after the death of her son. Now the village residents are fighting to legalize the memory of Alikov, who was killed in Syria.

Фото: Depositphotos

In the middle of September, 2017, a pensioner Nina Atyusheva, who lives in the village of Severoonezhsk, Arkhangelsk Region, was contacted by a man from Rostov-on-Don. He introduced himself as Andrey and said that she needed to come and collect the body of her son Yevgeny Alikov, who died in Syria.

“I told them that I couldn’t go to Rostov alone,” the woman recalls. “Then they replied that we don’t abandon our own.” On September 20 - they warned about the date in advance and ordered to organize a funeral for that day - a middle-aged man arrived in a car and “brought a coffin with my son, all his documents and money.” He carried the coffin with the body by car all two thousand kilometers from Rostov to Severonezhsk, as well as money - five million as an insurance payment for the death of his son.

The man simply laid out five million in cash on the kitchen table - stacks of five thousand dollar bills, tied with rubber bands. As Nina Atyusheva recalls, her ex-husband, whom she asked out of desperation to help with organizing the funeral, saw this and gloomily joked: “What a fool I am, I left you early.”

After handing over the body, money and certificates from the hospital, the man took a receipt from Nina Atyusheva, drank tea and left. In February 2018, the BBC correspondents tried to get in touch with Andrei along with Nina Atyusheva, but the man who answered the call said that his name was different and he did not know anything about the Russian volunteers in Syria.

“Mom, I’m going to the front”

Evgeny Alikov went to the Syrian war from a small urban-type settlement of Severonezhsk in the Arkhangelsk region. The village looks like a handful of five-story buildings on the banks of the Onega: even on tourist magnets, the main attraction here is the five-story building. They began to be built in 1973, when a bauxite mine began to be developed next door. The first generation of residents still remembers the times when, instead of a village, there were swamps all around, where people ran to collect cloudberries.

Residents have to travel almost 350 kilometers to Arkhangelsk; the nearest railway station is 36 kilometers from the city in the regional center of Plesetsk, famous for the nearby cosmodrome. The mine is still functioning, besides there is work in the administration of the Federal Penitentiary Service - so other single-industry settlements of the Arkhangelsk region even set Severonezhsk as an example.

Nina Atyusheva also worked at the mine as a welder, while simultaneously raising two sons from different marriages. Now both are dead. The first to die, in 2016, was the younger Artem, who studied in the village of Savinsky, seventy kilometers away - in February he stopped communicating, and in March, when the door to the dorm room was broken down, his body was already in such a state that, according to doctors, , it was impossible to establish the cause of death.

Evgeny Alikov was the eldest. He also left Severonezhsk: first to study in St. Petersburg, then, after getting married, to Moscow, where he lived with his wife and three children. Nina Atyusheva says that before his trip to Syria, her son, starting in 2014, visited Lugansk several times. There he fought on the side of the self-proclaimed LPR. The website “Peacemaker,” which is run by Ukrainian activists collecting a base of those who fought on the side of the self-proclaimed republics, says that in the LPR, Evgeniy Alikov was a member of the “Ghost” brigade of Alexey Mozgovoy, who was killed in 2015.

In 2016, after another trip to the east of Ukraine, Evgeniy’s nerve was pinched, he was partially paralyzed, and his wife called Nina Atyusheva from Moscow in Severonezhsk. “She said that she already has three children in her arms, why should she have a fourth, take your son,” the pensioner recalls. At home, Alikov was treated in the Plesetsk hospital for a couple of months. “He was treated, and he felt better,” says Atyusheva. “Then he went to Rostov-on-Don to a training center, where he stayed for about a month, and after retraining he was sent to Syria.” What kind of center this is, she doesn’t know. The media have repeatedly written that PMC fighters are trained at a base in Molkino in the Krasnodar Territory, and they are sent to Syria by military aircraft from Rostov.

His mother does not remember the exact date when Evgeniy Alikov ended up in Syria, but it happened in the middle of summer 2017. From the documents that were given to her after the death of her son, it follows that on May 19, 2017, he signed an “obligation” to receive a badge with the personal number M-3601. The standard badge number, which is officially issued to the military by the Ministry of Defense, consists of a capital letter of the Russian alphabet and a six-digit number; The numbers of PMC fighters located in Syria have been reduced to four digits. Evgeniy received his international passport, without which he theoretically would not have been able to enter Syria.

From Syria, Evgeniy sent text messages to his mother. Calling, he explained, is very expensive, so he wrote messages: “Mom, I’m going to the front.” He also said that the sand is so bad that it’s impossible to walk without glasses—it blinds your eyes.

The Syrian campaign lasted for Evgeny Alikov for just over two months. On September 2, he died near the city of Tias in Homs province from a “through gunshot wound to the abdominal cavity.”

Nina Atyusheva immediately took the received insurance amount of five million to Sberbank and deposited it into the accounts of her grandchildren - “Zhenechka wanted it that way.” According to her, her son was a good family man: “He loved both the children and me very much. He didn’t drink, he was very affectionate, he always took care of everyone. Handsome, tall, athletic. When they brought him [the body], everyone cried.”

In the few months that Evgeniy Alikov spent with his mother in Severonezhsk between trips to Lugansk and Syria, he kept something like a diary in a school notebook, writing down his thoughts in a sweeping hand: “As they say, the one who has a lot of money is not the rich one.” , and who has truth, faith and love for loved ones, and for me, loved ones are the people.” The entry with the subtitle “May 9” reads: “There are no geniuses, but there are those through whom God transmits his information.”

Body path

The package of documents that Nina Atyusheva received and handed over to the Russian service Bi-bi-si allows you to restore in detail what happens to the Russian volunteers in Syria after their death.

Already on September 2, according to documents, Evgeni Alikov’s body was brought to Al Skelbiyah State Hospital in the city of Hama, 160 kilometers from Tias, where he was killed. In the hospital, the body was examined by physicians in the presence of two witnesses, after which three certificates were drawn up.

First: “There are no traces of any infectious diseases on the body of Mr. Evgeniy Evgenievich Alikov, Russian by origin.”

Second: “The container with the body of Mr. Evgeniy Evgenievich Alikov, Russian by origin, is sealed.”

Third: “In the container with the body of Mr. Evgeniy Evgenievich Alikov, Russian by origin, there are no foreign attachments.”

The signature on all three certificates was put by the chief doctor of the Al Skelbiyah hospital Isam Muhammad Khosh.

By September 6, the Arabic certificates were translated into Russian, for which the Russian embassy paid 37 500 Syrian pounds (about 5 thousand rubles). Fidelity of the translation was assured by his signature 2 th secretary of the Russian Embassy in Syria Zaur Huseynov.

On September 7, the head of the consular department of the Russian embassy, ​​Turpal Autaev, signed a death certificate for Yevgeny Alikov and a death certificate.

After all these formal procedures, the body of the deceased was transported from Syria to the Arkhangelsk region for almost two more weeks. “On September 20, 2017, my son was brought to Severonezhsk, Plesetsk district, in a closed (zinc) coffin,” said her statement addressed to Sergei Krivenko, a member of the Human Rights Council, director of the human rights group “Citizen, Army, Law.” “And I buried him; I bore the costs of funeral services.” There was no one from the military registration and enlistment office.”

Together with the body and a package of documents, Nina Atyusheva was brought two medals from the Wagner PMC: “For courage and courage” and “For blood and courage.” Both medals are dated September 1, 2017. This could be either an engraver’s mistake or an indication that Alikov died at the end of August, and by September 2 his body was finally taken from the battlefield and taken to the Hama hospital.

Fallen #77

27 2017 October, the Reuters released an investigation that at least 2017 Russian citizens died in Syria in the first nine months of 131 - and this does not include official losses reported by the Ministry of Defense.

The agency’s material was based on a certificate of death of Russian PMC fighter Sergei Poddubny. Poddubny died on September 28 in the same city of Tias where Evgeny Alikov died. The death certificate, signed by the same embassy secretary, Zaur Huseynov, states “charring of the body” as the cause of his death.

In the help Poddubnogo is the number 131. According to the procedure adopted in Russian institutions, which is described in the order of the Ministry of Justice, as specified in its investigation Reuters, the numbering of such documents in each of the death registries starts from the beginning of the calendar year and is carried out sequentially. Thus, the number of each certificate corresponds to the number of deaths at the time of the recorded death during the current year.

The death certificate of Yevgeny Alikov, who died in Tias 2 of September, received the number 77.

Thus, only in September 2017, in Syria, at least 54 of the PMCs from Russia died. This is more than the official figures for all three and a half years of the campaign: according to the Ministry of Defense, the loss of personnel of the Russian armed forces during the operation in Syria amounted to 44 man. The last officially recognized as dead was the pilot, Major Guard Roman Filipov.

Numerous losses among Russian volunteers going to Syria as PMP fighters are not officially recognized or commented by the Russian authorities.

The last case of mass death of Russians in Syria occurred 7 February, when several detachments of PMCs came under fire from US aviation.

Status after death

For the recognition of the memory of her son, Nina Atyusheva began to fight immediately after his funeral. With a request about the status of his stay in Syria, she turned to the Plesetsk draft board.

“I asked for clarification: am I entitled, as someone who lost my breadwinner son, to any benefit, or some kind of tombstone, monument? I don’t know, there should be some kind of honor for my son,” she writes in her appeal addressed to HRC member Sergei Krivenko. “And I will be calmer, since my son defended the interests of his Motherland outside its borders, as we know, with the consent of the SAR.” Our specialists and military personnel helped. They also showed on TV our fallen servicemen, who were given all the honors necessary in such tragic situations in Russian settlements.”

Nina Atyusheva submitted her application to the Plesetsk military registration and enlistment office on October 5. A month and a half later, she received an answer: “It is currently not possible to determine the status of your son for further resolution of the issue of implementing legal and social protection measures.”

That's when village officials got involved. District Council Deputy Galina Staritsyna received an answer from the military registration and enlistment office in mid-December: “Who issued the badge with a personal number, how citizen Alikov Evgeniy Evgenievich ended up in the Syrian Arab Republic and received a through wound, as a result of which he died, it was not possible to establish. Therefore, its status has not been determined.”

Vasily Pulin, a public assistant to the ombudsman in the Arkhangelsk region, helped Nina Atyusheva make an appeal to the Human Rights Council under the President of Russia with a complaint that the state did not determine her any benefit because of the loss of the breadwinner and did not even help with the installation of the monument to the grave.

In turn, HRC member Sergei Krivenko at the end of January 2018 sent a request to the Investigative Committee and the Prosecutor General’s Office with a request to investigate the circumstances of the death of Evgeniy Alikov. As the human rights activist explains, this is the only thing that can be done from the point of view of the law: “If a citizen of the Russian Federation died outside of Russia, the Russian authorities can initiate a criminal case. Therefore, the question is: was any kind of investigation carried out, and if not, then did the Russian law enforcement agencies open a criminal case into the death.”

Deputy head of the Severonezh administration for social issues Lyubov Podorskaya suggested bringing a photograph of Evgeniy for the Immortal Regiment. In addition, the administration helped place a short obituary about the death of Nina Atyusheva’s son on the last page of the Kurier Prionezhye newspaper, next to private advertisements for the purchase of a dacha on the banks of the Iksa River and the distribution of puppies. Since on the site pleseck.ru The newspaper “Courier of Prionezhye” is published only in PDF format; neither journalists nor volunteers monitoring the progress of the military campaign immediately found a message about the death of another Russian in Syria. On February 15, Nina Atyusheva was invited to the day of remembrance of those killed in military conflicts outside of Russia.

Residents of Severonezhsk generally take a responsible approach to perpetuating the memory of their fellow countrymen: in the center of the village, next to the post office building, back in 2003, a memorial stone “To the fellow countrymen who died for the Motherland” was erected. Along the path leading to the stone there are signs listing wars: the Great Patriotic War, Afghan, Chechen and, finally, “Disasters, terrorist attacks, other wars.”

Recall as a result of unsuccessful attempts to take control over the refinery, which is controlled by the Arab-Kurdish detachments of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and American military advisers, died, according to various estimates, from the so-called “PMCs of Wagner” from 15 to 600.

The Ministry of Defense refused to admit any loss or the mere presence of its military in the area. The Russian Foreign Ministry acknowledged that in a battle near Deir-ez-Zor they could have died before the 5 of Russian citizens.

The command of the US-led international coalition assesses the casualties of the attackers in 100 people (with 300 – 500 participants in the attack), but has no information about the nationality of the victims.

According to a Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Gen. Geoffrey Harrigiana, US military advisers contacted with the Ministry of Defense, but having received the answer that there is no Russian military in this area, they began a response operation.

What do the relatives of Russians who died in Syria say in the article "There was no work, I wanted to make money."

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