The Moscow Times attended the funeral of one of the thousands of servicemen believed to have died in Russia’s “special military operation.” On a cold March morning in a southern Russian suburb, several dozen people gathered at a church to say goodbye to one of their own. Inside a coffin wrapped in the Russian flag and the paratroopers’ standard lay 21-year-old Kirill Ulyashev — one of the thousands of Russian servicemen believed to have died in Moscow’s nearly month-long “special military operation” in Ukraine. “Kirill is here as a warrior of Christ,” the priest began. “He fought against evil, Satanic spirits: Ukrainian Nazis, created by American multinational corporations.” The priest — Father Gennady Zaridze, a short, plump, bespectacled man with a long beard streaked with grey — is something of a local celebrity in Voronezh. At Sunday services, Maybachs and Rolls Royces belonging to the loyal elite line up outside his church on the edges of town. According to local journalists, on Christmas Day 2015, the priest was granted a personal meeting with President Vladimir Putin, who was visiting town. “The destruction of the U.S.S.R. was a great deceit visited upon the Russians,” the priest continued. “There was no law by which the republics were dissolved. Everything that was built after 1990 is a lie. All this will soon come to light, and you will know it.” (…) According to the paperwork, sapper Kirill Ulyashev had died two weeks earlier, on Feb. 27 — the third day of Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine — from wounds inflicted by a mine. He had received shrapnel wounds to his abdomen, arms and legs. The young man’s remains were brought home to Voronezh in a zinc coffin on March 15, his body so badly damaged that even his parents were forbidden to open the coffin.
via moscow times: At a Young Russian Soldier’s Funeral, Denunciations of ‘Ukrainian Nazis,’ Soviet Dissolution
Link: vk.com/@rudolfkleinschmidt-at-a-young-russian-soldiers-funeral-denunciations-of-ukraini