How I Lost the Russia That Never Was
Updated at 9:31 p.m. ET on November 25, 2023.
The lack of respect for the dead surprised even a soldier with the Wagner Group, Russia’s mercenary legion of former convicts that fought some of the bloodiest battles in the invasion of Ukraine. He looked at an ugly heap of wooden crosses and flower wreaths that had been pushed aside and cursed the authorities.
“What are you doing? They died for Russia, and you are razing their graves to the ground. You are rolling over them,” he said in a video shot at the time, pointing at the wreckage.
Workers were pouring concrete over a Wagner cemetery near the southern Russian city of Samara on August 24, part of Moscow’s punishment for the private army’s one-day mutiny in June. Not many in Russia noticed the soldier’s distress. Layers of injustice and mass killings go so far and so deep into Russia’s history that most of us have lost track. In Ukraine, the Russian army often leaves its dead soldiers behind.
Wagner’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, admitted that at least 20,000 of his soldiers had died in what he called the “meat-grinder operation” that had destroyed the once-charming eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut and finally captured its ruins in May. Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin, one of Wagner’s co-founders, were then killed in a mysterious plane crash in August, their once familiar faces melting into oblivion. The hypocrisy and the indifference of many Russians were astonishing: President Vladimir Putin first sold Prigozhin’s paramilitary fighters to the country as “heroes.”
