This is according to Radio Free Europe’s Russian service in the north-west of the country, which received a copy of the written appeal and spoke to family members involved. “We demand to find our loved ones, to add them to the lists of missing prisoners of war,” reads the petition, signed by 106 people. The message went on to request a meeting with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and accused the Russian Defense Ministry of “blocking” efforts to change the status of the missing soldiers, which affects whether efforts to repatriate them will be made. Families have accused the Defense Department of feeding them lies about the whereabouts of their loved ones, with military officials offering assurances that the men were alive, only for other officials to claim hours later that they had indeed died. “On April 3 I received a message from the other side (Ukraine) that he was killed. They (the Russian soldiers) had no phones or documents with them. I immediately called the military base. I said that they informed me that my husband had died and they said, “No, no, no, don’t worry. They are already taking them out.’ And after the 4th, the deputy civil officer calls and says, “He’s burned to death, he has nothing to collect,” Anna Danilova reportedly told the news agency about her search for her 47-year-old husband. She said she spent several days texting with someone who identified herself as a member of the Ukrainian military, who told her her husband had survived and was being treated in a hospital. But efforts to “reach out to someone” on the Russian side to secure her husband’s return proved futile, she said. “They tell me: ‘Prove that he is a prisoner.’ I know that on June 1 they took him from the hospital. I won’t say in which city the hospital is, I’m afraid for this doctor. I’m afraid to give this interview, but what should I do? If this is a criminal offense, I’ll do the time, just give me my husband back.” Irina Chistyakova, a mother who co-authored the appeal to Vladimir Putin, said Russian military officials have given her three conflicting accounts of what happened to her 19-year-old son: that he was alive and still fighting, that he was being held prisoner by Ukrainians and that he had been killed. “At the beginning of June the commissioner for human rights Tatyana Moskalkova received a response from the Ministry of Defense that my son is alive and being held illegally by the Ukrainian side. How did it get there, what does “illegally” mean? It was illegally cleared in Ukraine,” Chistyakova was quoted as saying. “He stood there on the criminal orders of commanders and under false pretenses. It was [supposed to be] on the border with Ukraine, not across the border. They seriously deceived him and others,” he said, adding that he has faced threats for raising the alarm about Russia’s treatment of its own troops. “My life is in danger and that danger comes directly from the military. A colonel told me: the military are psychopaths, if you push this, something irreparable will happen… I replied that this is my son and that scaring me with a bullet in the head is stupid. The colonel replied that he was not scaring me, but warning me that the military are psychopaths,” he said. Larissa, the mother of another soldier who disappeared in Ukraine, told the news agency that she had also been threatened for demanding answers from the authorities: “I was called by the FSB [Federal Security Service] and said: Shut up!’ All the families said the Russian Defense Ministry has made no effort to help them, which Chistyakova said demonstrates the “indifference of the authorities all the way from the president to municipal authorities.” The call comes after Ukrainian authorities have repeatedly said the Russians are refusing to collect the bodies of their dead soldiers, possibly in an attempt to keep the staggering death toll under wraps. The most recent Russian Defense Ministry death toll was released in March, when officials said only 1,351 soldiers had been killed. Russian news agencies were later ordered not to print information about the soldier deaths, according to local reports from early July. Instead, the Kremlin’s propaganda machine has jumped on the war against Ukraine as a matter of pride for ordinary Russians, with state television last week airing a clip about the shiny new Lada the man was able to buy thanks to compensation funds he received on the death of his son in Ukraine.
