“The ground is frozen 30 centimeters deep, it takes me three hours to reach softer ground,” slips Ivan, muddy pants, in his thirties. This employee of the Verkhnezarechenskoye cemetery, in a plain north of Volgograd, takes advantage of our discussion to breathe a little. The wind is freezing, and his work, digging graves, exhausting. “In December, we buried the soldiers in the chain, he confides, his heavy crowbar in hand. It was mainly mercenaries from the Wagner group who fell in the battle of Soledar. has calmed down a bit.” Sometimes, military flags adorn the graves: soldiers buried with honors. “My God, they are so young, whispers a woman. It’s so sad.” In a few weeks, five new cemeteries and a crematorium will be built, including “two specializing in military graves”, according to the local press.
Among the tombs, one of them particularly attracts visitors, that of Mikhaїl Khokhlatchev. Above his cross sits a large Wagner flag. Died on December 19, 2022, at the age of 47, this man was one of the detainees enlisted by Evgueni Prigojine, the head of this corps of mercenaries sent to Ukraine. Sentenced to sixteen years in prison for rape and murder, he had accepted the deal that this close friend of Vladimir Putin had offered him: if he went to the front for six months, the Russian state would grant him amnesty. A rather attractive offer, on paper, for these men without prospects. But few of them imagined, at the time of signing, the conditions in which they would fight: “Groups of eight people are sent with a single rocket launcher”, says Arseny Dronov, editor of the Russian Criminal website, directed by critical voices from the Kremlin.
Under-equipped, “they have to move forward no matter what. If they fall, other groups follow, then still others”. During the Battle of Soledar, he continues, 14 successive waves would have been launched. To describe this butchery, the brother of the mayor of kyiv, the former boxer Wladimir Klitschko, speaks of “waves of zombies”. According to Olga Romanova, a Russian human rights activist specializing in penitentiary issues, “80% of the prisoners enlisted by Wagner risk not returning from the front”. But there is no question of fleeing: the deserters are killed on the spot by their superiors… Recently, Wagner stopped recruiting prisoners, assured Prigojine. He would have enrolled more than 30,000.
“The government forces them to kill”
On February 2, Vladimir Putin made a rare trip to the city of Volgograd to pay tribute to the victims of the Battle of Stalingrad, its former name. For the head of the Kremlin, the objective was above all to politicize Russian history by insisting on the parallel between the Great Patriotic War and the conflict in Ukraine, and by agitating the threat of NATO, ready to invade Russia. From the morning, tanks engaged in its “special military operation” marched alongside armored vehicles having fought in 1942. But the Russians do not necessarily see the link between the Second World War and the offensive in progress.
“To me, all of this is bazaar-vokzal, I don’t understand anything about it”, sighs Ania, a mother. The expression, which originally refers to the hubbub of a station hall, expresses an incomprehensible situation. Every year, on February 2, professional corporations travel in groups to pay tribute to the victims of Stalingrad. Ania came with colleagues from her textile factory. “Our grandmother died opposing the fascists, she says. So many people have shed their blood for this city…” But when asked about his experience of the conflict, his voice breaks. “This year has been tough for us, my husband was sent there, she, away from her colleagues. They were forced to go there. But over there, it’s not our lands they’re protecting. The government forces them to kill, they are given no chance to escape.”
Others are less critical. In the city center, Andrei, forty, supports him, the “special military operation” of the Kremlin, an “obviousness”, he says. At his side, his son is dressed as a soldier to pay homage to their grandfather, a veteran of the famous battle. “History must be transmitted to the younger generations so that all this does not happen again”, he is convinced. But precisely, isn’t it happening? “It’s not the same thing, he refutes. The problem today is the West. Our men must protect our borders, but soon everything will be fine.” Between veterans and rapists buried as heroes, Russians exalted or forced to fight the “Ukrainian Nazis”, in Volgograd, a certain confusion reigns in people’s minds. And Vladimir Putin, during his visit, did nothing to dispel the fog of war.