By: Bowie Zeng
Yevgeny Chubarin, a 24-year-old stone-factory worker, was killed the next day after he joined the fight against Ukraine. His mom cried and begged him not to go. Vladimir Krot, a 59-year-old Soviet-trained pilot, a retired Afghan war veteran, decided to fight in Ukraine, too. He died just days later, when his SU-25 jet went down during a training flight in southern Russia, leaving behind his wife and 8-year-old daughter.
War casualties are taboo in Russia, as if they were a state secret. Information about war dead could deter Russia's increasingly urgent recruitment efforts to enlist prisoners with military experience and to offer lucrative deployment contracts.
This summer, internal security agents visited Dmitry Shkrebets. He suspects Russian authorities of lying about how many sailors died when the Black Sea flagship Moskva was sunk by Ukrainian missiles on April 13. His son Yegor, one of the conscripts onboard, was listed as “missing.” Shkrebets senior detailed on VKontakte, the Russian version of Facebook, that his laptop was confiscated as agents accused Shkrebets of making bomb threats. One hundred and eleven days after Yegor’s death, the military finally gave his father a death certificate.
“It will never be easier,” Shkrebets wrote in a post. “There will never be true joy. We will never be the same again. We have become different, we have become more unhappy, but also stronger, tougher. We no longer fear even those who should be feared.”
As of July 29, independent Russian media outlet Mediazona and BBC News Russia counted 5,185 people killed in the war. By contrast, the CIA and British intelligence agency MI6 estimate that at least 15,000 Russians have been killed since their country’s invasion of Ukraine in late February.