Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 2 – The human
tragedy of any war is not captured by statistics about killed and wounded but
rather by the losses of the individual soldiers and their families and friends.
The latter far more than the former bring the meaning and the horror of a
conflict home – and do more to define how people feel about it than does any
television broadcast does.
That makes a report about the
arrival in Ussuriysk, a city of 165,000 people in the Russian Far East of 17
coffins containing the remains of Russian soldiers who died in the Donbas fighting
important because it sheds light on what is happening in an increasing number
of Russian cities, towns and villages as Putin’s war in Ukraine continues.
According to a former Russian
soldier, the simultaneous arrival of such a large number of coffins has
generated “a definite shock among the local population,” despite all the efforts
of Russian officials to keep the funerals and information about where these men
met their deaths (crime.in.ua/node/7468).
Given the official information
blackout, the former soldier said by telephone from Ussuriysk, it is unclear in
which units those now dead had been serving, but it appears that they were professional
soldiers (“kontraktniki”) from the 14th brigade of the GRU Special
Forces of the Russian General Staff.
That is because, he says, in
September, people in the city learned that about 500 members of that brigade
had been flown supposedly to Rostov oblast, “as people there said, ‘to the West.’” (Until June 2012, this brigade had been based
in Ussuriysk; then it was shifted to the larger city of Khabarovsk.)
According to this source, the men
now being buried thousands of kilometers from Ukraine met their deaths in one
of the battled for the Donetsk airport.
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