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In lengthy interviews, the women said they were surprised how Mr. Ovlashenko, until then largely apolitical, suddenly began repeating the government’s far-fetched view that the West was planning to use Ukraine as a springboard to attack Russia. If he had not fought in Ukraine, he said, he would have had to fight the enemy on the streets of Bataysk, his hometown, a railroad junction near the southwestern city of Rostov-on-Don.
Mobilization changed the calculation of the war. It was no longer some distant “military operation”, as it is still called in the Kremlin, in which contract soldiers, mercenaries and Ukrainian separatists participated, who were forcibly drafted into service. Suddenly, ordinary Russians were thrown into the trenches.
Now, more than five months later, the pace of the return of the dead and wounded to Russia is gathering momentum, with zinc coffins arriving in places like Bataysk. This pattern is repeated throughout Russia, even if the dead remain largely hidden.
“The numbers are classified,” said Max Trudolyubov, a Russian political scientist and newspaper columnist from Vilnius, Lithuania. “Mobilized from small towns, from the outback. The strategy is to spread the losses across the country as thinly as possible.”
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