Very young, some conscripts and on the front lines without training, mostly coming from the most remote places in the country. The money allocated for the modernization of the Russian armed forces “stolen and invested in yachts,” says former foreign minister Kozyrev
The youngest of those identified so far had turned eighteen. David Arutyunyan died in the Donbass region, hit by a shrapnel. One of the many Russian boys of the so-called Putin’s generation sent to slaughter in Ukraine
according to increasingly frequent testimonies collected in the cities of origin of these inexperienced soldiers.
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The latest news on the war in Ukraine
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Some were even drafted
, 12 months of naja in which one hardly learns to save oneself from the oppression of “grandparents”. Many others fighting around Kiev, in front of Mariupol, in Kharkiv are technically “professionals”, but this only means that during their year of service or at the end of the draft they have been persuaded to sign to remain in the Russian army. However, they did not have any particular training and immediately ended up in the battalions engaged in “maneuvers” which, according to the version that the Kremlin has been repeating for months, would never have resulted in an invasion. And instead from one day to the next they found themselves across the border to cope with well-trained and certainly much better-armed units.
David was trying to rescue a comrade after their armored vehicle was hit. It came from Kyakhta, south of Lake Baikal, not far from the border with Mongolia. Ilya Kubik was also 18 years old and came from the city of Bratsk, in Siberia.
Then the nineteen years old
Anatolij Torsunov, from the Perm region; and the contemporary Alexei Kuzmin, from Magnitogorsk, at the foot of the Urals. Alexei Martynov, who was also a native of Buryatia, like David. Dozens and dozens of names that emerge as the bodies return home and the parents organize the funeral.
They were born when the idea of a democratic and liberal Russia was already waning, arose on the ashes of the Soviet Union. The hopes aroused by the popular revolt against the coup leaders of 1991 were extinguished with the great poverty and the collapse of the following years. Putin rose to prominence in 1999 when he rekindled Russian pride as prime minister with his campaign against Chechen terrorists. “We’ll chase them into the toilet,” he promised. And then he broke Chechnya by razing Grozny to the ground.
The Russia of these young people is a country of limited freedom, with a democracy that by definition is “guided from above”, as one of the president’s advisers theorized in the early 2000s. A proud and powerful nation on paper but full of rot. Those who can avoid military service like the plague because he knows that everything happens in the barracks; that kids in peacetime are sent to absurd places to survive on meager food rations. THEl massive modernization of the armed forces on which billions of euros have been spent to a large extent it took place only formally. The former foreign minister Andrej Kozyrev explained: “Most of the money was stolen and ended up invested in yachts moored in Cyprus».
Above all, poor children end up in the army, those who come from the most remote places in the country and who have no alternatives. How Yegor Pochkaenko di Belogorsk nella Siberia orientale who died the day before he turned 19.
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At the controls there are no men and so any means are used to raise the numbers even if the generals know very well that such inexperienced young people are of little use. Officially the conscripts should not go to fight in the war that is not war but Special military operation
. But even the Kremlin has admitted that “there have been mistakes”.
Now new conscripts are arriving, 134,500 who will take the place of those who are about to take their leave. It is among these that the commands draw to replace losses. In the end, they say, they are soldiers who have had a year of naja. Then attempts are made to enlist immigrants from Central Asia who do not have jobs in the big cities. Various organizations promise Russian citizenship in exchange for three months in the army.
Three hundred young people from South Ossetia who had already ended up in Ukraine have deserted and returned home. The Soldiers’ Mothers Committee that has existed since the Afghanistan war in the 1980s attempts to assist families. Often he manages to get news of the Ukrainians who have fallen because the Russians tend to leave the bodies on the field. Those recovered partly end up in Belarusian morgues so as not to create too much alarm at home.
But for now it does not appear that the return of the coffins is cracking the faith of the majority of Russians in their leader. Putin’s consensus has risen further, to 83%, according to independent polls. And many parents say they are proud of their children who are fighting for the sacred homeland: «He died for us. We have to continue until victory, ”he said on the radio German wave Natalya, the mother of Sergeant Yevgeny killed in the battle for Hostomel airport, near Kiev.
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April 1, 2022 (change April 1, 2022 | 16:29)
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