Mothers aren’t even allowed to know how their sons died.
Via Telegraph:
Anton Tumanov gave up his life for his country – but his country won’t say where, and it won’t say how.
His mother knows. She knows that Mr Tumanov, a 20 year-old junior sergeant in the Russian army, was killed in eastern Ukraine, torn apart in a rocket attack on August 13.
Yelena Tumanova, 41, learned these bare facts about her son’s death from one of his comrades, who saw him get hit and scooped up his body.
“What I don’t understand is what he died for,” she says. “Why couldn’t we let people in Ukraine sort things out for themselves? And seeing as our powers sent Anton there, why can’t they admit it and tell us exactly what happened to him.”
As the year draws to a close, the Kremlin continues to insist that not a single Russian soldier has entered Ukraine to join pro-Moscow separatist militia who have been fighting government forces there since April. During his annual press conference earlier this month, Vladimir Putin, the president, said that all Russian combatants in Ukraine’s Donbas region were volunteers answering “a call of the heart”.