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Russia is burying its dead after the partial mobilization ordered by Vladimir Putin last month. Testimonies accumulate of reservists neither trained nor equipped, sent to the front in Ukraine, where several have already lost their lives.
Under the gray skies of Siberia, the grief of a family and an entire village. His name was Nikita Perlin, he died a few days before his 32e anniversary, on the front somewhere in Ukraine. He had never fought before. Its story is that of hundreds of Russian reservists mobilized urgently at the end of September, on the orders of President Putin. “He was mobilized on September 29. Five days later he was in Ukraine. He died shortly after. We are very angry, there is no preparation for these men. They were sent to Ukraine like cannon fodder”says Anastasia Kemer, a friend of the Perlin family.
Anger, in this distant plain of Siberia, plunged in spite of itself into war. Four other young reservists from the same district died at the same time as Nikita Perlin. His relatives openly criticize the conditions of his mobilization and the mess of command in the announcement of his death. “A few days after he arrived in Ukraine, we received his death notice. Then an officer came to tell us that it was a mistake, and that they did not know where he was. A week later, the army called his wife to tell her that in fact it was he who had died”, says Maria Martynova, friend of the Perlin family. According to the Kremlin, since the end of September, 200,000 reservists have reinforced the ranks of the Russian army, to face the Ukrainian counter-offensive in the east and south of the country.