Residents of a Russian town in the Siberian region of Irkutsk are reported to be crowdfunding for body bags amid a mounting death toll in the war in Ukraine.
The developments were first reported by the People of Baikal Telegram channel, which describes itself as an independent media outlet that tells the stories of those from the Irkutsk region and the republic of Buryatia in eastern Siberia. X (formerly Twitter) account ChrisO_Wiki, a self-described independent military historian and researcher who posts updates on the war in Ukraine, shared the channel’s posts on the platform.
Russian military helicopters painted with the letter Z, a tactical insignia of Russia’s troops in Ukraine, are seen flying behind a cemetery near a military airfield outside Taganrog in the Rostov region on July 26, 2022. Residents of a Russian town in the Siberian region of Irkutsk are reported to be crowdfunding for body bags.
STRINGER/AFP/Getty Images
“So many Russian soldiers have been killed in the Irkutsk region that the local authorities have run out of money to transport them back to their relatives. Local people are now having to crowd-fund for body bags and the transportation of corpses,” he wrote on Thursday.
Residents of the town of Ust-Kut in the Irkutsk region are asking for the donations for body bags to transport the bodies of their fallen men in the war in Ukraine. Russia’s Ministry of Defense funds only the cost of transportation to airfields “capable of handling military transport planes,” said ChrisO_Wiki.
“However, these may be hundreds of kilometers from where the relatives live, necessitating the use of ground transportation as well.”
The town of Ust-Kut is located some 300 kilometers (186 miles) from the nearest military airfield, which is in the city of Bratsk in the Irkutsk region.
The transportation of the bodies of fallen troops to their homes was previously covered in the Irkutsk region by the ‘Zvezvda’ fund, “but this has passed to municipal educational funds – which have run out of money,” ChrisO_Wiki added.
He said that the wife of soldier who was mobilized for the war in Ukraine took to social media “appealing for help, not for judgment.” She said that the Russian Defense Ministry wasn’t doing enough to help transport the bodies of troops killed in battle.
“We need a large number of pathological bags for evacuations! It will take a long time to wait for them to be provided. When leaving for evacuation, they may take the usual number, but in reality it will turn out that there are more than usual,” the woman wrote.
Newsweek couldn’t independently verify the reports and has contacted Russia’s Defense Ministry for comment by email.
The war in Ukraine has taken a high toll on Russia’s ethnic minorities, Newsweek previously reported.
Vladimir Budaev of the Free Buryatia Foundation, a pro-democracy group based in the United States, told Newsweek months into the war that Russian President Vladimir Putin “definitely thinks that ethnic minorities are expendable.”
Activists and local officials have reported throughout the war that Russia’s ethnic minority populations were disproportionately being rounded up to fight in Ukraine.
“The most common reason is it’s just the colonial policy of the Kremlin—for Putin, it’s kind of reasonable to send one ethnic minority group to conquer another ethnic minority group,” Budaev said.
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