Coffins in Buryatia: Ukraine invasion takes toll on Russia’s remote regions
A lot of the soldiers dying in Putin’s war are from poorer ‘ethnic minority’ republics, says Russian military expert
Russia-Ukraine war: latest updates
Pjotr Sauer
Wed 30 Mar 2022 05.00 BST
Last modified on Wed 30 Mar 2022 09.30 BST
Holding smoking incense sticks and singing hymns, a group of Buddhist monks sat in front of the open coffins of four Russian soldiers killed fighting in Ukraine as hundreds of mourners gathered on Monday at a local sports centre in Ulan-Ude, the capital of the remote Buryatia region in Russia’s far east.
“We are distraught. This bloodshed needs to stop. Our boys are dying,” said Olga Odoeva, the sister-in-law of Bulat Odoev, one of the four soldiers being buried.
Odoev, who joined the military 10 years ago, was killed in battle outside Kyiv on 15 March, nearly 4,000 miles away from his home town.
“He just didn’t want to let his team down. He felt it was his duty to go,” Olga said hours after the funeral finished. “Our family opinion on this differs from the one held by authorities, but what can we do?”
Russia has only disclosed the most limited information about its losses in the war in Ukraine, saying that 1,351 of its soldiers have died in the fighting, a number that is far lower than the estimates made by Nato and Ukraine.
Officials have also not provided the names of the dead or given any details about where they served, but as the war in Ukraine has entered its second month, group funerals such as the one of Odoev and his comrades, as well as reports by independent local media outlets, indicate that Buryatia, and other republics far away from the Kremlin, have been disproportionately affected by the conflict.
“It is becoming clear that a lot of the soldiers who are dying are from the poorer ‘ethnic minority’ republics like Buryatia, Kalmykia and Dagestan,” said Pavel Luzin, a Russian military expert.
Russia is divided into 85 federal subjects, 22 of which are republics, originally created as regions to represent areas of non-Russian ethnicity.
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Luzin said the lower ranks of the Russian army were particularly filled with young men from those republics who enlist after their mandatory conscription ends, mainly for financial reasons.
“It is a golden ticket for many young guys to get out who don’t have any other prospects in life. The army offers a job, a decent salary, a future.”
Buryatia, lying between Lake Baikal and Mongolia at the eastern end of Siberia, is one of the most impoverished of Russia’s regions, with an average monthly salary of just 44,000 rubles (£390), despite holding some of the country’s largest deposits of natural resources. Between 30% and 40% of its 1 million population are ethnic Buryats who traditionally practise a mixture of Buddhism and shamanism.
Ludi Baikala, a small independent media outlet that covers the region, has so far identified and named 45 soldiers from Buryatia who have died in Ukraine, but it believes the real number is much higher.
“The 45 are just the ones we managed to identify. There will be many more that are not talked about,” said Olga Mutovina, a journalist for Ludi Baikala.
In other republics, local journalists’ investigations and rare admissions by officials also reveal a significant death toll.
In Dagestan, Radio Svoboda reported that at least 130 soldiers from the mountainous Caucasus region had died, and a senator from Tuva on the Mongolian border has publicly said that 96 soldiers from her small republic were killed in Ukraine. If these numbers are accurate, the three republics of Buryatia, Dagestan and Tuva alone would make up almost a quarter of all the official Russian war deaths.