By: Avery Duan

On May 11, Yevgeny Chubarin left to Belgorod in southern Russia. When he told his mother,

Nina Chubarin, he was joining the Russian army, she begged him not to go. When he got to

Belgorod, he sent her messages and videos. He had only four days of training until he got an

AK-47 and headed to war. He was killed the next day. The military had told his mother that he

was found dead near Mariupol “He knew it was dangerous,” she said. “He was a very brave

guy, was not afraid of anything. He was so cheerful and open and so kind.” She thinks that he

wanted to prove that he was a man. She also wonders if he was trying to get back at his ex-wife. Another soldier, Vladimir Krot, a Soviet trained pilot and a retired Afghan war veteran, begged to serve in Ukraine. He kept asking even when he got rejected until he was told ”yes” Krot died a few days later when his US-25 jet went down in a training flight in southern Russia. He left behind a wife and an eight-year-old daughter.

The number of people killed in war is a secret. It is a crime to interview people affected by the

invasion or censure the military. Journalists who talk to bereaved relatives have been arrested

and told that showing “tears and suffering” is bad for the public.

Internal security agents visited Dmitry Shkrebets after he accused Russian authorities of lying

about the number of sailors who died when the Black Sea flagship Moskva was sunk on April 13 by Ukrainian missiles. His son, Yegor Shkebets, who was one of the recruits on board, was

listed as “missing”. The agents accused Shkrebets of making bomb threats and confiscated his laptop. 111 days after Yegor’s death, Shkrebets got a death certificate. “It will never be easier,” Shkrebets wrote in a post on a Russian version of Facebook, VKontakte. “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.”