'Your husband is absent': how relatives of the Russian military sent to Ukraine are trying to find out where they are and whether they are alive at all - ForumDaily
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'Your husband is absent': how relatives of Russian soldiers sent to Ukraine are trying to find out where they are and whether they are even alive

From the first days of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, social networks were filled with photographs of captured and killed Russian soldiers. The issue of exchanging the bodies of the dead was acute back in March - President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky asked the Russian authorities to take the dead. Although periodically body exchanges occur, a single mechanism for this process has not been developed.

Photo: Shutterstock

Relatives of Russian servicemen who are listed as missing have been seeking official answers for months about the fate of their relatives - sometimes already knowing that they were not missing, but died. Edition with the BBC spoke about such searches on the example of stories from an occupied, but then liberated, Ukrainian village in the Kharkiv region.

In early May, volunteer Vyacheslav Ilchenko returned to his native village of Malaya Rogan, near Kharkov. This is a small settlement 20 km from the center of Kharkov, which is located near the city ring road, on the highway that leads to Chuguev, an important logistics center of the Ukrainian army.

The village of Vyacheslav was under Russian occupation - burnt enemy tanks stood on the streets, many houses were destroyed. The house of Ilchenko's parents was also damaged, but they themselves remained alive - they hid with friends at the other end of Malaya Rogan.

During that trip, Vyacheslav met a soldier from the 92nd separate mechanized brigade of the armed forces of Ukraine, which was liberating Malaya Rogan. Then the serviceman told Vyacheslav about the buried soldier.

“In your garden there, we buried a guy from Tyva. There was only one fool left, we offered him to surrender, and he threw a grenade at us. And we were forced to liquidate it, and then buried it,” said the Ukrainian.

Vyacheslav indeed found a fresh grave of a Russian soldier, but not in his garden, but in a neighboring one. The owner of this site, Stanislav, was told the same story of death by the Ukrainian military. Stanislav himself said that during the occupation of Malaya Rogan he was in Kharkov and saw the burial place only upon arrival in the village after his release.

A green rubber boot was visible above the grave, plywood was nailed to a wooden cross with the inscription: “The Russian occupier Namchal Artysh Chedder Oolovich is buried here.” Also, in small letters, the Ukrainian military wrote the date and place of birth of the Russian. An army badge was put on the cross.

Volunteer Ilchenko filmed the sign on video for his blog and took the token. Later, he learned from local residents that this burial of Russians in the village was far from the only one. Three houses down the same street, another body of a militant from the Russian Federation was found in the basement, and at the end of the lane, a pit with three more soldiers was found.

“He messed up something there, so he went to the contract”

Artysh Namchal is a countryman of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. The 22-year-old native of Tyva, before serving in the army, was a student at a music school in Saryg-Sepe (a village with a population of 4 thousand people, located 90 km from the capital of the Republic of Kyzyl), then he entered a music college in Abakan, in Khakassia bordering Tyva . Artysh actively performed at various events, toured neighboring republics and was the author of his own songs.

In 2019, he and his common-law wife Daria had a child, and Artysh created a personal studio where he recorded both author's songs and tracks for other performers. As he told on his YouTube channel, for equipment for the studio - a microphone, a sound card and other devices - his sister had to take out a loan so that he could "record at least one normal song." On Artysh's VKontakte page, there are ads where he offers services for "organizing concerts", "photo and video editing", writing "backing tracks" (1000 rubles) and mixing vocals (500 rubles).

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Artysh published his last music video with his song in September 2020.

“Here came the wind of change, it's just a buzz. Hear bro, it’s clean air, you look,” these were the lines in the song that Artysh wrote shortly before being drafted into the army. He left for the service at the end of the fall of 2020, before that he posted a poll in his group on VKontakte “To end the career of a music label or not?”

Somewhat later, photos from the barracks began to appear in this group, where a shaved Artysh smiles next to a colleague. The last entry in the group was dated January 3, 2022 - Artysh is in uniform and rubber boots.

According to Daria, he went to serve in the army on conscription, but he did not want to be a military man.

“He messed up something in the military service, and, probably, the management forced him to sign a contract. So he went to the contract, ”said his wife.

Artysh went to serve in a tank unit in Yelna, near Smolensk, and from there he periodically came home. In February 2022, Artysh called his wife and said that they were being sent to Ukraine. On March 10, he called back again - this time from Ukraine. “He said that he was alive and well,” recalls Daria.

Close colleagues of Artysh tell the same chronology of events. Irina's husband, 21-year-old contract soldier Dmitry, just like Artysh, went to Ukraine at the end of February. The couple got married just a few months before that, in October, Irina recalls: “And they didn’t live normally for two months because of his field trips.”

At the beginning of 2022, Dmitry sent his wife from the military camp where they lived to her parents. And already on February 26, he called his wife from the Belgorod region - right before leaving for Ukraine. “On March 10, he called and said that everything was fine with him, that they didn’t even shoot, they just sat in the trenches,” Irina recalls a conversation with her husband.

Aleksey, a contract soldier from another Russian military unit that invaded Ukraine on February 24 and went in the direction of Kharkov, immediately informed his wife that "there would be no communication." “On March 13, he called that everything was fine. Ass, but normal, ”recalls Natalia.

“They just didn’t want to drag him”

Judging by local chats, the occupiers could have settled in Malaya Rogan already on February 27th.

“My brother went to Malaya Rogan. The military is just a bunch of Russians. I drove there normally, when we were driving back, I pointed the muzzle of a tank at them, got under fire, got out on all fours, ”this is how a local resident described his brother’s trip to Malaya Rogan on March 2 in a chat.

“A tank drove into my parents’ yard, and Russian soldiers moved into their basement. There were more or less adequate occupiers there and they said: “Get out of here, dad.” And they went to their friends at the other end of the village,” recalls volunteer Vyacheslav Ilchenko. Other village residents also told reporters that the Russian occupiers were staying in the houses of local residents and parking equipment in their yards.

Due to broken power lines in the village there was no electricity and communications, and there was a shortage of food and medicine. Because of the constant shelling, people lived in cellars and a local school. According to the international human rights organization Human Rights Watch, on March 13, a Russian military man entered the school building and repeatedly raped a 31-year-old woman who was hiding in the school with her family. The woman told human rights activists that the invader beat her and cut her face, neck and hair with a knife.

The prosecutor's office of Ukraine accused the occupiers of war crimes in Malaya Rogan, in particular, the murders of civilians, whose bodies were discovered after the liberation of the village. Ukrainian media, referring to the stories of local residents, wrote that Russian servicemen robbed locals and threw them out of their homes. The head of the Kharkiv regional administration, Oleg Sinegubov, said that it was from the territory of Malaya Rogan that Russian artillery “constantly shelled” Kharkov. The village was under Russian occupation for almost a month.

On March 25, the head of the Kharkov garrison, Sergei Melnik, spoke about the “cleansing” of Malaya Rogan and the surrounding villages. On March 25-27, the offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on the village started. Battles were fought in Malaya Rogan, and after a couple of days information about possible losses began to reach the families of the Russian military. Some were contacted by colleagues, like Irina.

Her husband, 21-year-old contract soldier Dmitry, was unable to return from Malaya Rogan: “The political officer told me that on March 26 they had a battle. They were leaving the basement of the house, there was shelling, terrible bombing, and they understood that they could not stay there, they had to leave there. My husband was walking behind, he was hit in the kneecap by a bullet, and fell. And the political officer says that they tried to drag him. But he’s so big, 130 kilograms, so tall. In my opinion, they just didn’t want to drag him, they thought: “We won’t leave with him,” and left him, it seems to me.”

Alexey’s wife, Natalya, also contacted her husband’s colleagues. “They told me that they were sitting in the basement of the house, and a grenade flew there. The Ukrainians shouted: “Let’s surrender.” The husband said: “I’m wounded, I’ll try to get out now.” Our people responded by throwing a grenade at them and trying to escape. And my husband was seriously wounded and could not get up, he was severely cut by shrapnel.”

The Ukrainian military got in touch with others, as with Artysh's wife, Daria. On March 25, on the VKontakte network, from an unfamiliar account, she received the message “the occupier died in Ukrainian soil.” Artysh's passport was enclosed with the letter. "Where does this information come from?" Daria wrote back. In the photo, it seemed to her that her husband was holding the passport (“the finger looks like,” she wrote), so she was not completely sure that Artysh had died.

After the Ukrainian military recaptured Malaya Rogan, it turned out what could have happened to some of the captured Russian soldiers. Some sources spoke of 27 Russian soldiers who were taken prisoner in the area of ​​Malaya Rogan. And already on April 9, the Center for Strategic Communications of the Armed Forces of Ukraine published information that a mass grave was found near the village, which the Ukrainian military discovered after the retreat of the Russian army.

Why did it take so long to return the bodies of dead soldiers

From the first days of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv has repeatedly raised the issue of the unclaimed bodies of the Russian military. On March 3, Ukrzaliznytsia announced that they would allocate 20 refrigerated cars for the storage and shipment of bodies. Vladimir Zelensky at the end of March, in an interview with Russian journalists, said that Kyiv was trying in every possible way to agree on the transfer of the corpses of the dead, but Moscow, in response, "offers some kind of bags."

Two months later, the head of Ukrzaliznytsia, Alexander Kamyshin, said that about 270 bodies were stored in the cars. “The Russians leave their own on the battlefields, and every day we burn 100 liters of diesel fuel per car in order to store these bodies - to maintain the temperature in refrigerators,” he said.

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In conditions when the front line is constantly changing, the problems of evacuating corpses and searching for missing people arise very often. The retreating military does not always have time to pick up the 200th and seriously wounded colleagues, and some military (for example, those who went on reconnaissance to enemy positions, or those who fell asleep or were strongly thrown aside during artillery shelling) simply cannot even be found.

“With a constantly changing front line, it can be difficult for belligerents to secure their flanks from enemy incursions. And this, among other things, affects the operations to evacuate the bodies of the dead. Some such raids become impossible or too risky, said Samuel Crenny-Evans, an expert at the Royal Institute for Defense and Security Studies. - In the conditions of such a war, which we now see on the territory of Ukraine, the problems of the living will always take precedence over the dead. And efforts will always be focused on preserving and providing for those who are alive.”

The expert emphasizes that the USSR and Russia have previously had frequent problems with finding their missing military. More than 1 million Red Army soldiers are still listed as missing in action during World War II. It is worth noting that for decades, volunteers have been doing almost all the work to find and bury the remains of these soldiers. As a result of the war in Afghanistan, 264 Soviet soldiers are still missing. About 200 Russian servicemen are considered missing during the two wars in Chechnya.

During the fighting in 2014-2015 in the Donbas, both Ukraine and representatives of the self-proclaimed DPR and LPR faced the problem of returning the bodies left in the territories occupied by the enemy. At that time, the front line also changed frequently and quickly.

When active combat clashes continued, servicemen on both sides of the conflict promptly agreed and exchanged the bodies of the dead. In places where the fire died down, the volunteers of the Ukrainian organization "Black Tulip" took up the search, exhumation and return of the bodies to their families. Before that, they had been searching for and burying the remains of soldiers who died during the Second World War for many years. In 2014-2018, the "Black Tulip" was able to find and bring to the territory controlled by Kyiv, the bodies of more than 800 Ukrainian soldiers. There is no exact information on how many bodies were transferred to Donetsk and Lugansk, but it is known that the number was in the dozens.

After the Russian Federation launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it was not possible to build a permanent negotiation process between Moscow and Kyiv. This also affected the exchange of bodies of the dead. Informal agreements between the military on the front line work only in isolated cases. According to members of the Black Tulip, the Russian side does not yet plan to guarantee the safety of Ukrainian volunteers on its territory. The search for the bodies of the corpses of Russians in the territory controlled by Kyiv is actively engaged in a special department within the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, the Black Tulip also helps with the exhumation.

As of June 9, it was possible to find out the names of 3502 Russian invaders who died in the war in Ukraine. This information does not reflect the real level of losses of the Russian army, since only publicly confirmed death reports can be used for calculation. These calculations did not include data on Russian soldiers who went missing, since there is no way to establish their number even approximately. It is authentically known that the account goes, at least, on hundreds. The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation last informed the public about the losses in the war on March 25 - there were 1351 people. Information regarding the total number of missing people was never reported by the department.

"The bodies don't know where"

The bodies of family members cannot be found not only by relatives of the Russian military personnel who were in Malaya Rogan. Alexandra from the Moscow region, the bride of 22-year-old contract soldier Andrey, says that the funeral came to her fiancé's parents on April 4. Colleagues of the contract soldier told the family that on March 29, Andriy was driving in an armored personnel carrier convoy through the territory of Ukraine towards the Russian border, but the car was blown up by a mine in the Chernihiv region. The military managed to take some of the remains, and they even took a DNA analysis from Andrey's parents, but it was not confirmed.

“At first, the unit said that the special forces had taken the bodies, they should be in Rostov. Then they began to say that the bodies are unknown where. A week later, they began to say that the bodies were left where the explosion had occurred and they could not be taken away, ”recalls Alexandra. In total, four people were driving in the car with Andrey. “From this group, one wife agreed that her fiancé was dead, and began to draw up documents for payments through the court. And three others, together with us, are striving to return either the body of the deceased, or his living one.

Not much is known about what happens to the dead soldiers who remain lying in Ukrainian soil. It can be assumed that from the settlements where active hostilities were fought, 200s are taken to refrigerator cars, from where they will be sent to Russia. On April 25, journalist Vladimir Zolkin published a video with the filming of the cars where the bodies of the Russian military are being preserved (their location is not disclosed in the video). In the frame, the corpses lie in refrigerator cars, forensic experts work with some of them - they take off their clothes, examine the bodies in search of documents, notebooks, tattoos and other identification marks.

One of the 200s was carrying an appeal from the “commander of a grouping of troops” to “personnel”, which stated that “nationalist formations cynically kill women and children.” “There is a search for any things that can be found on a person. During the procedure, a forensic expert, a photographer are present and a card of the deceased is formed. There are so many of these dead that it’s tin,” Dmitry, co-host of Vladimir Zolkin, comments on the video.

One of the methods of identifying the bodies of Russian military personnel, which Ukraine uses, is face recognition technology, according to the Ukrainian Mintsifra. The program can find relevant user profiles in social networks from the photo of the deceased. So, in the demo video, the algorithm from the photo of the dead soldier finds his profile on VKontakte - it turns out to be 21-year-old Daniil Grinko from Tomsk. Grinko was buried on April 10 in his native village near Tomsk, local media reported.

On May 16, Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine Mykhailo Fedorov said in an interview with CNN that the department had already processed more than 300 such cases and passed information about the dead to the relatives of the Russian military.

In May, Volodymyr Lyamzin, head of civil-military cooperation of Ukraine, standing by a refrigerated car with hundreds of bodies of fallen soldiers, said that “Ukraine is ready to give the bodies to the aggressor,” but “there is no dialogue between Russia and Ukraine on this issue.”

In total, the journalists contacted the families of seven Russian military men who lost contact with their families after March 25. All of them confirmed that their military relatives were in Malaya Rogan, they stopped communicating, and they are considered missing in the military units. “I wrote to Russian President Vladimir Putin, they answered me that they had sent a request to the Ministry of Defense, they said they would look into it, but then there was silence. I also wrote to the Red Cross, but they don't say anything. And they don’t say anything in the unit,” says Irina.

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“They said harshly that your husband has gone missing, stop calling. We cannot give any papers that he is missing,” Natalya retells the conversation with the military unit.

Some wives of the occupiers are studying the videos released by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, others are looking on social networks for the Ukrainian military who liberated the village in early March, and are trying to find out from them the fate of their betrothed. But it is not possible to find out anything about the missing in this way.

It is also worth noting that the bodies of some of the Russian servicemen who died in Malaya Rogan are already in their homeland. According to Natalia, in April they were brought to a hospital in Rostov-on-Don, DNA samples were taken from their relatives in early May, and as soon as the analysis showed kinship, the remains were given to the families. For example, on April 8, Alexander Bespalov, the commander of one of the Russian military units stationed in Malaya Rogan, was buried in the Chelyabinsk region.

In mid-May, a team of Ukrainian military and forensic experts arrived in Malaya Rogan to exhume the bodies of Russian servicemen. They dug up, including the grave, on which there was a tablet with the name of Artysh Namchal. On the footage in the report of the Vikna-Novyny journalists who witnessed the exhumation, there is a Promsvyazbank bank card in the name of Artysh, which, according to the journalists, was found along with the body. The Internet even got a video with a body lying in a grave.

Artysh's wife, Daria, watched this video, but still doubted his death - according to her, the body of the military man, who was exhumed from the grave, does not look like her betrothed in addition. She also managed to find out the number of the token that was on the plate and dictated it to the military unit, but they told her that the number did not match Artysh's token. In total, the bodies of 62 Russian military armies were found in the Kharkiv region, 12 of them in Malaya Rogan.

Relatives of missing Russian soldiers continue to wait for news. When asked what they would like, Irina finds the answer right away: “Since the Ministry of Defense sent them there, let them return either dead or alive. Not a single person deserves such that he does not even have a grave anywhere. This is some kind of nightmare, as if he fell through the ground. I understand that either he died there, or miraculously survived. But I don’t believe in a miracle either, so much time has passed. So many bodies were scattered all over the village, and no one takes them away, is that also wrong? It is necessary to return the dead to close people in order to bury them humanly. After all, some understand that people died there.”

“So far, he is only in words - absent. Didn't come out, didn't show up. They brought them in, but they didn’t take them out, ”Natalia said. - But I have a complete feeling that he is a prisoner. I know he was going to give up." Daria had been hoping for more than two months that Artysh had not died, but could have been seriously wounded and surrendered, and continued to look for him.

The situation in which the military unit gives only verbal answers to the families is troubled by the fact that the wives of the missing military cannot receive the compensation promised by the authorities. According to the law, the relatives of the dead soldiers are entitled to several types of payments: insurance coverage, a lump sum and monthly payments.

In early March, Putin said that insurance coverage and a one-time allowance for the families of dead soldiers totaled more than 7,4 million rubles. To receive these payments, the family, among other things, must provide a death certificate, a certificate from the military unit on the circumstances of the insured event and a copy of the report on the death of a soldier.

In order for relatives to receive a monthly allowance for a soldier who died or disappeared during hostilities, either a document confirming his death in the line of duty or a court decision declaring the soldier missing or dead is required.

Most likely, it will be possible to officially recognize a person as dead only after the end of the war. According to Art. 45 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, a missing serviceman may be declared dead by a court no earlier than two years after the end of hostilities. The question is whether a particular court will consider the missing military man as a missing or dead participant in Russia's "special operation" in Ukraine, and how long it will take.

On June 4, the Ukrainian Ministry of Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories of Ukraine published information that an exchange of bodies of the dead had taken place on the front line in the Zaporozhye region. They exchanged "160 for 160", specified in the department. Four days later, the Ministry of Reintegration reported on a new exchange - "50 to 50". The bodies of Artysh and Dmitri were probably among those transferred during the large exchange. The first was brought to the Russian Federation on June 8, his wife Daria told reporters. On June 11, he will be buried in Kyzyl on the Walk of Fame, the Tuva news public VKontakte reported. The body of Dmitry, Artysh's colleague, should be delivered to his homeland in a few days.

Alexandra's fiancé, who came under fire in the Chernihiv region, is still missing.

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