By: William Liao

Amid the Kremlin’s attempts to silence dissent, the Russian government has cracked down hard on the grieving families of fallen soldiers, saying that “tears and suffering” are bad for public morale. Those who have spoken out have been met with censorship, visits by government agents, or being called ‘traitors’ on social media, but many refuse to be silenced.

The true extent of the Russian military’s casualty numbers is unclear. The latest figures from the Russian government were published months ago, when it acknowledged the deaths of around 1,300 soldiers. Independent Russian news outlets, relying on open-source information, have put the figure at 5,185 deaths, mainly concentrated in the impoverished outlying regions of the country.

Western intelligence agencies have estimated a figure three times that, in addition to tens of thousands of wounded. M16 chief Richard Moore said that was “probably a conservative estimate.”

To put this into perspective, Soviet forces lost roughly the same number of troops over ten years in Afghanistan, and a two-decade war in both Afghanistan and Iraq left only 7,000 American soldiers dead.

As a result, families all over Russia have been left grieving in silence over their lost sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers. Further exacerbating matters, the Kremlin has ordered for online memorial pages to be shut down and arrested journalists who spoke with relatives of the deceased. For the Russian government, their efforts to suppress discord have paid off.

Bobo Lo, a former deputy head of mission at the Australian Embassy in Moscow, said that Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, “has been able to defend this.” Results from a poll by a government-leaning organization showed that 72 percent of Russians back the fighting, and the Kremlin has concealed the true death toll so well that scores of Russian men have volunteered to go for three-month contracts in Ukraine, many of them never returning home.

24-year-old Yevgeny Chubarin, a former conscript and native of Karelia, decided to join Russian forces in Ukraine on May 11, despite his mother begging him not to go. He was found dead outside Mariupol just a few days later.

Some have turned to social media platforms to express their anger at the Russian government. Sergei Dustin of Baltiysk called the war a “massacre started by crazy old men who think they are great geopoliticians and super strategists, incapable, in fact, of anything but destruction, threats against the world, puffing out their cheeks and endless lies.” His 19-year-old daughter was married to Maksim, a Russian marine, who was killed in Ukraine, while an old friend of his was fighting for the opposite side. Some people commented on his post, calling him a traitor.

Not all those who had been eager to join the war even made it to the front – some died in training accidents preceding their deployment. Vladimir Krot, a 59-year-old Soviet-trained fighter pilot and veteran of the war in Afghanistan, died in a botched training flight in southern Russia, leaving behind his family. His repeated petitions for a chance to go to Ukraine had been repeatedly rejected until a “yes” was finally given to him amid mounting Russian casualties in June.

In a sign of how far the crackdown on dissent went, internal security agents paid a visit to Dmitry Shkrebets. He had accused Russian authorities of lying about the casualty count from the sinking of the Moskva, the Russian flagship in the Black Sea, which included his son Yegor, who had merely been marked as “missing.” A hundred and eleven days after Yegor’s death, his father finally received his 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.”

Original article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/07/russia-ukraine-war-deaths-toll/