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 The documents Yelena Tumanova was given with the body raised more
questions than they answered - questions about how her son died and
about the Russian government’s denials that its troops are in
Ukraine. The records do not show Anton Tumanov’s place of death,
said human rights activists who spoke to his mother after she got in
touch with them.
"Medical documents said there were shrapnel wounds, that is he died
from a loss of blood, but how it happened and where were not
indicated,” said Sergei Krivenko, who heads a commission on military
affairs on Russia’s presidential human rights council.
Yelena Tumanova could not be reached for comment and Reuters was
unable to review the documents. But more than 10 soldiers in her
dead son’s unit told Krivenko and Ella Polyakova, another member of
the presidential human rights council, that Anton Tumanov died in an
Aug. 13 battle near the Ukrainian town of Snizhnye. The battle, the
soldiers said, killed more than 100 Russian soldiers serving in the
18th motorised rifle brigade of military unit 27777, which is based
outside the Chechen capital of Grozny.
Rolan, 23, a fellow soldier who served with Tumanov, told Reuters
that his comrade died on the operating table after he was hit by
shrapnel from rockets. Rolan said he was steps away in an armoured
personnel carrier when the rockets struck. He said two in his group
died, including another soldier, named Robert.
"I was inside an APC, hatches were open, and as a result I was
lightly stunned and shell-shocked," said Rolan.
"Robert and Anton were outside two or three steps away and they
simply did not manage to hide. Robert died right there. We gave
first aid to Anton, he was already on the operating table when he
died," said Rolan, now at home in Russia's Krasnodar region where he
is recovering from an injury.
Human rights workers and military workers say some 15 other Russian
soldiers have been killed in Ukraine, with hundreds more now in
hospital.
The fact that Russian soldiers have died in a war in which they
officially have no involvement is a problem in Russia. Chatter about
young soldiers returning home in coffins has begun to spread over
the past few weeks. Though still limited, such talk has powerful
echoes of earlier Russian wars such as Chechnya and Afghanistan.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said this week that Russia had
moved most of its forces back across the border into Russian
territory after a ceasefire between Kiev and the separatists in
Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. But a NATO military officer said on
Thursday that Russia still had 1,000 troops in the country.
The idea of an outright invasion of eastern Ukraine by Russian
troops is highly unpopular in Russia. A survey by pro-Kremlin
pollster Fund of Social Opinions said 57 percent of Russians support
the separatist Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics, but only 5
percent support an invasion of Ukrainian territory.
Russian authorities have worked to systematically silence rights
workers' complaints over soldiers’ deaths, intimidating those who
question the Kremlin's denials that its soldiers are in Ukraine.
Krivenko and Polyakova, who is also the head of an organization
representing soldiers' mothers in St. Petersburg, filed a petition
on Aug. 25 asking Russian investigators for an explanation for the
deaths at Snizhnye.
So far they have heard nothing. But soon after the petition was
filed to the Investigative Committee, a law enforcement body that
answers only to President Vladimir Putin, Polyakova was told her
organization, which has existed since the 1991 break-up of the
Soviet Union, had been branded a 'foreign agent.'
The term, brought in by Putin in 2012 to set apart non-governmental
organisations that receive foreign funding and engage in political
activities, carries no real punitive measures but is often used to
discredit critics of the Kremlin.
Polyakova says she has been at odds with the authorities over her
stance toward Russia's annexation of Crimea. She believes
authorities gave her the ‘foreign agent’ tag because of her petition
and an Aug. 28 interview with Reuters in which she first accused
Moscow of covering up the deaths of Russian soldiers.
"It's all linked. This was just the last drop, so to speak," she
said.
SERVING IN UKRAINE
Officially there have been no Russian soldiers in Ukraine. But Kiev
maintains that Russian troops have in the past few weeks helped
separatists reverse the tide of the conflict, pushing Ukrainian
forces back from the Russian border and allowing the separatists
access to the sea.
And Reuters was able to find people who know of hundreds of soldiers
injured in Ukraine, or whose relatives are fighting in Ukraine,
building up the most comprehensive picture yet of Russian
battlefield casualties in the country.
A military doctor told Reuters that hundreds of Russian soldiers
injured in fighting in eastern Ukraine are now in military hospitals
in the regions of Moscow, St. Petersburg and Rostov, which borders
Ukraine.
"Generally they bring (the injured) to Rostov and to Moscow," he
said.
Sergei Kozlov, an IT specialist in Moscow, says his nephew Nikolai,
a paratrooper based in Ulianovsk, was sent to Ukraine on Aug. 24. He
was hit by a shell after he crossed the border, Sergei Kozlov said,
and lost his leg.
"He was operated on in Rostov Province and then was brought to
Moscow because there was no more room there. But even now there is
no room in Moscow hospitals or in St. Petersburg because they're all
filled with people injured in Ukraine," Sergei Kozlov said by phone.
Nikolai, who Sergei said is still in hospital, could not be reached.
A cab driver in Moscow who gave his name as Vitaly said his son was
also sent to Ukraine. He has a picture on his dashboard of the
20-year-old boy smiling atop an armoured personnel carrier.
Vitaly says he is furious that his son – a paratrooper based in
Pskov near Estonia - has been sent to Ukraine to fight for the
rebels.
"They sent him there illegally to fight for the rebels two weeks
ago. He says he'll be back on Nov. 20. I'm counting the days," he
said.
Vitaly says officers tried to force his son - serving mandatory
military service - to change his status to a contract soldier, which
would legally allow him to serve abroad. Conscripts in Russia are
exempt from foreign service.
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His son refused to sign, but officers sent him to Ukraine anyway.
"They dressed him up like a rebel so no one would know he was a
Russian soldier and off he went," said Vitaly.
Rolan, the serviceman who fought alongside Tumanov in Snizhnye, says
he spent 10 days fighting in Ukraine in the middle of August. Back
home in the Krasnodar region, he said his commanders offered
soldiers the option to go to Ukraine. The men could refuse, but the
commanders were very supportive of those who agreed. Rolan went, he
said, because of his military oath and to protect Russian-speakers
from Ukrainian forces, routinely referred to as fascists, in Russia.
His unit put him on paid leave to make the trip. "(I wanted) to
push neo-Nazis and pure fascists deep into the country or eliminate
them and to free Russian-speaking population of this evil," he said.
He said he crossed into Ukraine in a truck without a license plate.
"On the Ukrainian side of the border, rebels met and guided us. In
fact there is no border, just a field of sunflowers. There is Russia
on one side of it and on the other side there is no more Russia."
“NO RELATION TO REALITY”
Independent Russian news outlet Dozhd has tried to keep a list of
the Russian soldiers injured, detained or killed in Ukraine.
But the number of Russian soldiers serving on the side of
pro-Russian rebels against Ukrainian troops is unknown.
Russia's defense ministry strongly denied reports that Russian
military units were operating in Ukraine.
"We have noticed the launch of this informational 'canard' and are
obliged to disappoint its overseas authors and their few apologists
in Russia," a ministry official, General-Major Igor Konashenkov,
told Interfax news agency.
"The information contained in this material bears no relation to
reality."
A Facebook page called "Cargo 200," the Soviet term for the bodies
of soldiers sent home from war, is also trying to protest at the use
of Russian soldiers in Ukraine and connect soldiers and parents to
better understand how their children died.
Yelena Vasilyeva, who helps organize the group, blamed Russia's
Federal Security Services, the successor agency of the Soviet KGB,
for hacking attacks.
"Our group is suffering attacks most likely from the Federal
Security Services since Aug. 20. On the site it's been going on for
five days," she said.
Krivenko, of the presidential human rights council, said Russia's
failure to admit that its soldiers are in Ukraine is part of a long
tradition of hiding military activities or playing them down, as in
the first war in Chechnya.
"When the Chechen War began, it also started out without a
declaration of war. And Russian soldiers participated in secret
until troops were officially sent in Nov. 1994. Until then, they
took off their uniforms and entered the conflict as volunteers,"
Krivenko said in his office at Moscow-based rights group Memorial.
"Everyone understood that there was war going on there but everyone
tried to hide it in every possible way," he said.
COVERING TRACES
Rights activists and their lawyers say the biggest difference
between the first Chechen War in the 1990s and now is that Russian
authorities have become better at stopping information they don't
like.
In the northwest Russian city of Pskov, reporters were chased away
from a cemetery in late August where, according to accounts on
social media, two Russian paratroopers killed in Ukraine are
secretly buried.
On Aug. 21, Ukrainian journalist Roman Bochkala published on his
Facebook page what he said were photographs of Russian documents
recovered after Ukrainian forces clashed with an armoured column of
pro-Russian rebels near the village of Heorhiivka, eastern Ukraine.
The photographs show a passport in the name of a 21-year-old man
called Nikolai Krygin issued in the Pskov region. There was also an
insurance certificate, also issued in Pskov, and a copy of the
military rule-book for Russian Airborne Troops. Reuters was unable
to locate Krygin.
Pskov is the hometown of the 76th division of the Russian Airborne
Troops. Its base is a few kilometres from the cemetery.
A Russian politician told Reuters he was badly beaten by unknown
assailants after publicising the funerals of the paratroopers in
Pskov.
"There is a weaker civil society now. Now the entire system is
closed. In a closed system, what happens covers the entire system,
investigators, doctors," said Polyakova.
Vitaly Cherkasov, a human rights lawyer, said that authorities are
using threats and administrative punishments - like ‘foreign agent’
status - to keep people from talking. But even with that pressure,
information spreads.
Yulia Ganiyeva, 22, received a phone call from an anonymous officer
on Sept. 4, informing her of the death of her fiance Alexei Zasov,
22, who served in the 31st paratroopers brigade in Ulianovsk,
Vladimir Lenin's home town on the Volga river.
"They officially said that he was killed on Russian territory but
the truth is that he was killed in Ukraine," she said.
"I got in touch with soldiers who served with him. They told me he
was killed in Ukraine."
(Additional reporting by Denis Pinchuk in Pskov, Russia and Anton
Zverev in Moscow; Edited by Simon Robinson)
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