By: Sophia Wang
As the war with Russia and Ukraine goes on, many young Russian men have gone to war only to die in battle. Their grieving families are becoming angry, and they’ve started to blame the military and question the war. When families called out the Russian authorities and grieved their sons, they were arrested and told that “tears and suffering” was harmful for public morale and the struggling recruitment endeavors for the war.
Although most families don’t publicly question the war and choose to remain silent, there have been a few who have confronted the Russian officers by making posts and videos on VKontakte, the Russian version of Facebook, and other available social media platforms.
24-year-old factory worker Yevgeny Chubarin told his mother that he wanted to join the army. His mother begged him not to go, but he pushed through and received a little training before being armed with an AK-47 and sent out to war on May 15th. He died a day later. His mother, Nina Chubarin reported that he called her before he went to fight.
“That was it. That was the last time we spoke,” she said. “He was a very brave guy, was not afraid of anything. He was so cheerful and open and so kind.”
Sergei Dustin, the father to 19-year-old Alexandria married a marine named Maksim, also died in the war and the family has been angry and upset since.
Dustin was deemed a traitor after saying that the war was a “massacre started by crazy old men who think they are great geopoliticians and super strategists, incapable, in fact, of anything but destruction, threats against the world, puffing out their cheeks and endless lies.”
On July 20th, the CIA reported that since the war started, the Russian army has suffered over 80,000 casualties. They’ve estimated that the Russian army loses around 15,000 men a week.
A group of wives from Buryatia made a video pressing the authorities to bring their husbands home. Soldiers are contacting organizations to try and break their enlistment contracts. People are posting every day on VKontakte, sharing their grief about their dead family members.
“Oh god, please stop this war. How many of our guys can die?” someone named Yevgenia Yakovleva wrote. “My soul is torn from pain. I don’t know how to accept this, survive and live with it.”
Sources:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/07/russia-ukraine-war-deaths-toll/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/09/russia-has-lost-up-80000-troops-ukraine-or-75000-or-is-it-60000/