"The body is completely destroyed." Russians through the court prove the death of the military

"Vieststa" discovered that since June 2022, Russian courts began to consider claims for the recognition of the dead military personnel, whose bodies remained on the battlefields in Ukraine. In 2022–2023, at least 176 such claims were received by the courts. From court decisions it is clear that the Russian army threw corpses during the retreat, and some bodies were so damaged that the remains could not be assembled.

Text: Daria Kucherenko, "Logger"

"Ripped an explosive wave"

“He was lying there from October to August. And, you yourself understand, except for the bones, there was nothing to collect there. And it’s not the fact that all the bones were collected,” the wife of the volunteer Jeanne tells the “mile” (the name of the heroine was changed at the request of the woman). In May 2023, the 18-year-old son of Jeanne filed a lawsuit and won. He asked to recognize his father to be dead - his colleagues saw his death, but the body could not be taken out of the battlefield.

At the end of October 2023, Jeanne, who was a representative of her son in court, received the text of the decision, and two days later she was called from the Ministry of Defense and reported that they identified the remains of her husband and were taking them from Rostov by plane.

Jeanne's husband, a 50-year-old physical education teacher without combat experience-at the end of July 2022 signed a contract with a volunteer unit in one of the Ural regions. Almost immediately, he was appointed commander of the tank. Two months later, on October 4, he died in the battles under the New Kakhovka in the Kherson region. In the court decision, which was found by the “Labella”, the colleagues said that the man leaned out of the tank to the waist and led the evacuation of another combat vehicle. At that moment, an artillery shell fell into it and "the body was torn by an explosive wave." The remains could not be found then.

The commanders and relatives are filed by lawsuits

The civil case of the recognition of the dead of the husband of Jeanne is one of the dozens of cases that, after the beginning of the full -scale invasion of Russia, the courts throughout the country began to be considered. The commanders of military units and relatives of military personnel go to court if the situation seems hopeless to them. They already know that a person died, but they cannot bury him: either it was not possible to evacuate the corpse due to shelling, or the body was torn to such small parts that it was not possible to collect them . In this case, the court may admit that a person went missing under "circumstances threatening death," which means he died.

In 2022–2023, at least 176 claims were received in the courts of Russia and the annexed Crimea to recognize military personnel missing or dead , the "Virtsta" found out, analyzing the bases of all district courts. Most of them - 126 claims - were filed by military prosecutors and commanders of military units, 50 claims came from relatives of the military.

The first claims after the start of the full -scale invasion of Russia in Ukraine appeared in June. 16 of them were registered in one place - the Nakhimovsky district court of Sevastopol. They were submitted by the commander of the military unit No. 42948. In this unit, the crew of the Russian cruiser "Moscow" served by Ukraine. The court granted all 16 claims, and in August and November 2022 he examined and satisfied the claims for two more sailors who served in this military unit. Probably, not all relatives of the crew of the cruiser decided to go to court. In April 2022, the Russian Ministry of Defense reported that one soldier died as a result of the sinking of the ship, and 27 people disappeared. According to Medusa , 37 sailors could die on the ship.

The peak of cases of recognition of the dead servicemen came in the second half of 2023. From June to November, the courts received more than half of all the claims filed over almost two years of the war - 118. This may be due to the fact that in the winter of 2023 the Russian army suffered the largest losses, and in the spring the State Duma simplified the procedure for recognizing the Russians who fight in Ukraine. Now the military may be recognized as dead six months after he was missing. Provided that the relatives or commander of the unit will prove: the soldier was in circumstances that threatened death.

"There are few precedents"

According to Jeanne, her husband went to war, because he was "offended by the state." He evaluated the chances of dying as low. “He told me three days before he left there:“ Here's a list, gather my things for me. ”I thought, well, he would play a man in a war, reassured himself. He told me that he would return soon, we will cover the table, we will celebrate it. And everyone who goes there is so thinking. But I have already had a lot of friends and acquaintances of the girls.

The husband called Jeanne from the front and briefly reported how he was doing. For example, he told how Ukrainians in the occupied territories relate to Russian soldiers. “He said that elderly people, Ukrainians, are good, they say, well done slate, that they arrived and help us. And youth through their teeth. That is, tell him“ you can ” - and he will go at you. And all the youth is there, although they have everything from the Soviet Union, all Soviet houses, and there are no new houses,” the woman says. Sometimes her husband sent her photographs so that he would “not be sad”: “Here is a photo with grapes-they found the field of ownerless and ate. They said that everyone ran up, and the harvest dries, disappears.”

Jeanne began to worry in October last year, when the calls from her husband stopped. At first, she called him in Telegram every day, but no one picked up the phone. Then she began to communicate with the wives of other troops in order to reassure herself. But all women admitted: their husbands call from the front at least once every two weeks. Jeanne decided to call the battalion in which her husband consisted: "I told them that she had lost contact, and they told me that they could only confirm his status - it was active or not. He had" active "status, which means that he later learned that the status is" active "to those who disappeared."

This information reassured Jeanne a little, but she decided just in case to go to the appointment of the head of the region. According to the woman, she told the commissar about her situation, and after an hour she was called from the Ministry of Defense with the words: "Your husband died." Jeanne was told that the husband’s body could not be taken from the battlefield. This, according to the woman, gave her a little hope that her husband could still be alive. But every month her belief that her husband would return home became weaker.

Zhanna decided to engage in paperwork about her husband's death. It turned out to be difficult. Both in the military unit and in the Ministry of Defense she refused to issue a death certificate - military officials referred to the fact that first they needed to find and identify the remains. The woman decided to seek a husband’s recognition to those who died through the court.

She hired a lawyer for 20 thousand rubles, collected documents, found colleagues who returned home from the front, and asked them to tell on paper how her husband died. In May, on behalf of her son, the family filed a lawsuit. Jeanne explains that she and her husband divorced in 2007, but continued to live together. Legally, she could not file a lawsuit herself, so she asked her son.

The 18-year-old son of Jeanne-a college student-went to preliminary hearings, and then, according to the woman, refused to participate in the process. “The son for this year has become half a gray -headed and does not want to talk about his father at all,” says Jeanne. She decided not to force the teenager and represented his interests in court. At the meetings, the woman had the impression that the judge was still reinsured: "There are few precedents, such cases were not considered in our court at all, so the judge asked to bring more and more new documents."

Jeanne managed to win the court, and after a month and a half she was brought to her husband’s body in a closed coffin. The bones were identified thanks to DNA expertise. Jeanne recalls that the military official shared with her: in the plane on which her husband was carried, there were 82 more coffins with bones of military personnel who were missing a year ago.

Detailed evidence of deaths

"One of the shells hit the funnel in which FULL NAME4 was with his colleagues, after which the explosion followed. After the shelling was finished, after about half an hour, they approached the position of FULL NAME4, examined the funnel. Nothing except for shreds - residues of military uniforms in the funnel and its nearby territory, they did not find such testimonies about the battles in the" LPR "in March 2023 In the Soviet district court, Vladikavkaz was given by a soldier of the 291st Guards Motor Rifle Regiment from Chechnya. The court hearing at which he spoke was dedicated to his colleague-the 38-year-old native of North Ossetia, who had missed in the war with Ukraine. Relatives of the contractor through the court proved that a large father died at the front.

The courts try to hide information about military personnel whose bodies could not be taken out of the battlefield, and most often do not publish judicial acts. But the "Vies" managed to find 18 claims, the decisions on which are published in the public domain. In all cases, we are talking about the Russian military, which went missing in the war with Ukraine in 2022–2023.

Witnesses - commanders and colleagues - often literary and in detail describe the death that occurred before their eyes. From the court decisions that the “Lesser” studied, we can conclude that the military bodies and relatives resort to the help of the court in cases where the corpse of a soldier could not be pulled out of the fragments or it was not possible to evacuate due to dense shelling, and also if there was almost nothing left of the body.

"The prisoners did not take"

In the winter of 2023, the Leninsky District Court of Stavropol, at the request of relatives, recognized the corporal of the corporal of Starynkov who died in the war. He served under a contract in military unit No. 41600 (deployed in Stavropol). Witnesses told in court that the Khimars reactive system of a rack system got into the Sa-14 RM car, in which the corporal was located in which the corporal was located. Starenkov’s body was not found-the commander and colleagues suggested that it simply melted due to high temperature.

In May 2023, the Primorsky Regional Court, on the application of the mother , agreed to consider those who died at the front of the sergeant-contracted Sevryukov from military unit No. 21634 (deployed in Ussuriysk). The soldier was wounded in battle, and the rescue unit evacuated him on a stretcher in more, as it seemed to them, a safe place. But after some time, a shell fell and exploded next to the wounded Sevryukov. The colleagues did not find any remains of the sergeant.

In the summer of 2023, in the Nurlata District Court of Tatarstan, which was considered the case of recognizing the volunteer of the Bars detachment, the witness said that volunteer soldiers went on a mission and were surrounded by the Ukrainian military. Several people were able to break out. According to them, the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces shot the military and "did not take prisoners." The surviving volunteers did not dare to return there and take the bodies of the dead colleagues.

In another court of Tatarstan - Baltasinsky district - in the fall of this year, the case was considered the recognition of the volunteer of the Alga battalion Radis Vafin. In written indications, the commander of the military unit No. 13637, to which the battalion belongs, said that the Tatarstan volunteers stormed Ugledar. Vafin received many fragmentation wounds. His body was left on the battlefield. The commander explained this by the fact that it was impossible to evacuate the dead due to dense mortar and artillery shelling.

Different media were written about the defeat of the Alga battalion near Ugled. In February 2023, the publication of IDEL. Reali spoke with relatives of volunteers. They said that the battalion suffered heavy losses and not all the bodies of the dead were evacuated. In March 2023, the Tatar-Inform publication published an interview with the battalion commander. He called the reports of the mass death of the Tatarstan troops "rumors" and "panic moods." Nevertheless, relatives of the fighters of the Alga battalion created a group of memory for the dead in VKontakte. There they say that they cannot get from the Ministry of Defense the return of the bodies of the fighters who died massively in February 2023 near Ugled.

"Virtsta" discovered at least 8 court lawsuits on the recognition of the dead military personnel from military unit No. 13637 (it included the Alga battalion). 3 of the claim were filed in the courts of Tatarstan, two in the courts of the Perm Territory and the Rostov Region, one to the court of the Republic of Chuvashia. From mid-March to October 2023, in the telegram channel, “Do not wait for me from Ukraine”, where Russians publish announcements about the missing military, according to the calculations of the “Virts”, 18 posts with the names of various military personnel who served in unit No. 13637 appeared.

"Not a widow, but not a wife"

“They just sent me to the dick rudely. I am very angry with our Russian Federation, if it is cursed,” the 28-year-old resident of the small city of Polesk Kaliningrad Region Victoria Dikareva, the wife of the volunteer of the Barc battalion Vyacheslav Dikareva, tells.

Victoria is one of the few wives of Russian troops who failed to win the court of recognition of her husband to the dead. Vyacheslav Dikarev signed up for the Bars detachment in early August 2022, spent five days in the barracks, then hit the front and died a week later during the assault on the village of Vladimirovka in the "DPR". According to Victoria, her husband did not count on such the finale of his battle path: "He believed that he would not participate in the hostilities at all. He said:" I will guard the liberated city or village. "I naturally believed, and therefore let him go."

The Dikarev family-Victoria, Vyacheslav and their 10-year-old daughter-lived in a small apartment with stove heating in an old house. Victoria’s husband went to war to “earn a pretty penny” and spend gas to the house. Now the woman recalls these words with a hysterical laugh and sobs: “I spent, yeah. As a result, neither my husband nor gas, and I will wave the second winter with an ax. I am a fire to Kolya and remember his words:“ Right now, Vic, I will go, heating. ”Yeah, now you will fuck heating.”

For two months - August and September - while Vyacheslav was listed in the personnel of the military unit, he was paid about 400 thousand rubles, says Victoria. In October, the amount has already arrived less - about 30 thousand rubles, and in November the payments completely ceased.

At this time, Victoria already knew that her husband was injured. In September, his colleague called her and said that the detachment was under fire in the area of the village of Vladimirovka in the "DPR". It was not possible to evacuate Vyacheslav: "He said that Artyom was my friend - his friend was torn off. And Glory had a strong fragmentation, he says, the expired quickly."

After this call, Victoria turned to the Kaliningrad leadership of the Bars detachment, but there they knew nothing about the fate of her husband. "I was told that we must wait. Do not mourn it and I have to wait six months. I waited as a fool. Every day it seemed to me that he died and I sobbed, and for the afternoon I reassured myself and convinced that we had to wait."

In April 2023, without waiting for the news of her husband, Victoria decided to file a lawsuit on the recognition of Vyacheslav to the dead. According to the woman, the financial situation prompted her to this: Victoria works as a saleswoman and receives 20 thousand rubles a month. Children's benefits for her daughter Pension Fund, as a woman says, refused to pay her - they referred to the fact that she needed a certificate of her spouse’s salary in six months. “And how can I take such a certificate if my husband is listed in the Ministry of Defense missing and he has no salary during this time, of course, there was no,” Victoria is indignant.

For four meetings, the Polesky District Court made a decision and refused to admit that Victoria’s husband died in the war. The reason was that, according to the court, Vyacheslav Dikarev did not have the status of a soldier. As it turned out during the trial, the commander of military unit No. 22179 issued an order to exclude Vyacheslav Dikarev from the lists of personnel from August 28, 2022 "in connection with death." A little later, the military prosecutor’s office conducted an audit of the commander’s orders and forced him to change the wording from “died” to “missing”. In a letter for the court, the commander explained that this order has no legal force at all. The document, according to him, is exclusively "informational in nature", since volunteers from the Bars detachment did not sign contracts with the military unit.

"Vieststa" found a civil case in the Stanovansky District Court of the Lipetsk Region on the recognition of the Bars volunteer, who, apparently, participated in the same battle as Victoria's husband. Like Vyacheslav Dikarev, a soldier Roman Krasov died in late August near the village of Vladimirovka. His body remained on the battlefield. But in this case, the court did not bother that Krasov was a volunteer, and the lawsuit of relatives was satisfied.

After the court’s decision, Victoria first fell into despair, and then decided to file a new lawsuit - about the recognition of her husband to be missing. This status will allow her to claim the payment of the loss of the breadwinner. Victoria believes that, refusing to recognize her husband to be killed in the war, the Russian state “beautifully sent her”: “This is not only my opinion, but also many ordinary people with whom I spoke. Why pay such millions for a person when he served there for two weeks.”

Now Victoria is thinking about how to stock up firewood for the winter. Она пыталась попросить помощи у руководства "Барс", но там ей не дали конкретного ответа: "В конце октября я уже просто не сдержалась и написала им, что у меня нет дров, денег на них нет. Сейчас будут морозы, и мы с ребенком просто одуреем. Они написали мне: "Хорошо, мы что-нибудь придумаем". И все, думают уже полмесяца".

Рассуждая о том, как сложилась её жизнь, Виктория признается, что, если бы знала, что ей предстоят страдания, развелась бы с Вячеславом до войны. "Мы с ним расходились и опять потом сошлись, – рассказывает она. – Лучше бы и не сходились. Сидеть постоянно на этих, блять, украинских сайтах и среди этих фотографий кишков, что они выкладывают, искать своего мужа ну это тоже… представляете? Я каждый день смотрела: а вдруг что-то они выложат, хотя бы тело. Чтобы мое подсознание дало мне понять: Вик, ну всё, это уже всё. А если не найдут тело? Как мне жить? Я теперь кто? Я не вдова, но и не жена".

Инфографика: Эль

Иллюстрации: Анна Иванцова