Body bags make Russians reflect on Ukraine war: AFP
Picture: AFP
Moscow. When Russian paratrooper Nikolai Kozlov was deployed to Crimea to help Moscow take over the peninsula from Ukraine, his parents were proud of him, AFP’s Anna Smolchenko writes.
Six months later Kozlov is disabled for life, an amputee now recovering in hospital from wounds incurred on a Kremlin-orchestrated covert mission to Ukraine to prop up separatists fighting against Kyiv.
The paratrooper’s uncle, Sergei Kozlov, said his brother asked him to help take care of the young man in the hospital.
“Seva called yesterday and said that Kolka had been wounded in Ukraine, and had lost a leg, or both legs – I didn’t ask,” Kozlov said, referring to his brother and nephew by their nicknames.
Kozlov’s written comments to AFP are part of an emerging trickle of first-hand accounts which – along with secret burials – are providing grim evidence of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine amid a virtual blackout imposed by state television.
The Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, the main rights group representing the military, has said up to 15,000 soldiers could have been sent into Ukraine over the past two months.
An adviser to Ukraine’s defence minister, Oleksandr Danylyuk, said on Facebook this week 2,000 Russian troops had been killed in Ukraine.
President Vladimir Putin has denied Russian troops are in Ukraine. He said the handful of soldiers captured by Kyiv authorities had wandered into the ex-Soviet country by accident.
On Wednesday Putin unveiled a seven-point plan to resolve the conflict in eastern Ukraine, and said a deal with Kyiv could be signed as early as Friday.
Crimea was annexed in March by Moscow following a disputed referendum in which residents voted to join Russia.
But the patriotic euphoria triggered by the return of the Black Sea region, which was under Moscow’s control before being handed to Ukraine in 1954, is slowly ebbing in Russia.
Most Russians are still unaware that Russian troops are fighting in the fellow Slavic country – or prefer to look the other way.
“I have not heard anything about any war,” Olga Burtseva, a mother of three, told AFP.
“No one crossed the borders, and I believe no one has declared war.”
A respected polling agency, the Levada Centre, said last week two-thirds of respondents did not believe Russia and Ukraine were engaged in a war.
But Russians’ readiness to support what many call a fratricidal conflict has dropped dramatically over the past months — to 41 percent in July from 74 percent in March, the pollster said.
© 2014 All rights reserved. Citing Focus Information Agency is mandatory!