By: Audrey Wang

Yevgeny Chubarin was a 24-year-old Russian man. He told his mother he was joining the Russian army to fight Ukraine. By May 15th, he had finished his training and was ready for war. But that would be the last time his mother ever heard from him. Many stories like Chubarin’s go unnoticed in Russia. To Putin, victory and conquest are much more important than mourning and grief.

Stories of soldiers dying in war are considered a weakness, a worthless string of words. For Russia, sadness and anguish should be buried under the triumphant joy of social media news. But, not everything can be hidden. A 59-year-old retired Afghan War veteran, Vladimir Krot, served his country once more when he was called to duty this year. Krot begged to fight for Russia. After repeated rejections, in June, he was allowed to serve in the army. A few days later, Krot left a wife and 8-year-old daughter behind when his SU-25 jet went down during a training flight. He had not even fought on the battlefield yet.

The number of deaths in the Russia-Ukraine war is a state secret. Questioning or criticizing the military is a crime. Journalists had been arrested because they spoke to people who have lost loved ones due to the war. The Kremlin, the executive branch of foreign affairs in the government of Russia, claim that “tears and suffering” is bad for the public morale, especially when they have already conquered a piece of Ukraine. But what about those who have lost, the ones who suffered?

So far, the Kremlin’s priority has been to stop protests and angry voices from leaking into the public. If any protest does break out and gain attention, Russia’s efforts to scrape together soldiers will be wasted. Prisoners who had military experience were given training and a gun and forced to fight on the Russian side. The Kremlin also offers highly paid contracts for deployments.

Internal security agents visited Dmitry Shkrebets, whose son died in the war. This summer, Shkrebets got in trouble with the agents after he accused the Russian federation of lying about how many men died when the Black Sea flagship was sunk by Ukraine using missiles. Shkrebets’s son, Yegor, was labeled “missing.” The agents then accused Shkrebets of making bomb threats, and confiscated his laptop, according to his VKontakte (a Russian form of Facebook) description. 111 days after Yegor’s death, the military finally gave Shkrebets a death certificate, saying that Yegor was not found alive.

The Russian outlet Mediazona and BBC News Russian counted 5,185 deaths as of July 29th, with Moscow losing only eleven servicemembers, and St. Petersburg, 35. Many of the greater losses were from the impoverished areas, like Dagestan and Buryatia. But the CIA and British Intelligence agency MI6 estimated that the loss is much higher – 15,000 would be the least. Richard Moore, MI6’s chief, said that it was “probably a conservative estimate,”.

Many other families have lost their loved ones because of the war. Yet Russia silences them, for the better of military conquest. When the deaths of local basketball players in Buryatia were announced, a woman named Raisa Durgarova stepped out. “Why does Buryatia have to bury its sones every day?” she questioned. “Why are we doing this?”