Comment When Yevgeny Chubarin told his mother he was joining the Russian army to fight against Ukraine, she cried and begged him not to go. But his exuberance shone through. By May 15, he had an AK-47 and was on his way. The 24-year-old stone factory worker was killed the next day. Stories like his are taboo in Russia, where the grief of many families is buried under the triumphant bombast of state media. The war is portrayed as an existential struggle for survival, against the “Nazis” as well as NATO, and a virtual blackout on news about the bloody toll underlines the Kremlin’s concern over the duration of its construction support. However, some stories jump out. Vladimir Krot was a 59-year-old Soviet-trained pilot, a retired Afghanistan war veteran, who begged to serve in Ukraine. He kept asking despite repeated rejections and, in June, as the victims mounted, they finally said yes. Krot died a few days later when his SU-25 aircraft went down during a training flight in southern Russia. He left behind a wife and an 8-year-old daughter. The number of war dead is a state secret. It is a crime to question the invasion or criticize the military. Freelance journalists who speak to grieving relatives or cover funerals have been arrested and told that showing such “tears and suffering” is bad for public morale. Authorities ordered some online memorial pages to be shut down. The Kremlin’s priority was to prevent the angry voices of grieving families and anti-war activists from converging and gaining traction. Information about the war dead could prevent Russia’s increasingly urgent recruitment drive, plucking prisoners with military experience and offering high-paying contracts for deployment. Homeland security agents visited Dmitry Skrebets this summer after he accused Russian authorities of lying about how many sailors died when the Black Sea flagship Moskva was sunk by Ukrainian missiles on April 13. His son Yegor, one of the conscripts on board, was listed as “missing.” Agents charged Shkrebets with making bomb threats and seized his laptop, he explained on VKontakte, Russia’s version of Facebook. On Tuesday, 111 days after Yegor’s death, the military finally gave his father a death certificate. “It will never get easier,” Shkrebets wrote in a post. “There will never be true joy. We will never be the same again. We have become different, we have become more unhappy, but also stronger, tougher. We are no longer afraid even of those we should be afraid of.” But independent analyst Bobo Lo of the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank, believes the Kremlin has largely contained the risk of unrest because of the high death toll. Because most people are so cautious about airing dissent, it is difficult to gauge the true level of support for the war. Pollster VCIOM, which is close to government officials, reported in June that 72 percent of Russians support the fighting. Patients and staff in the town of Borodyanka are still recovering from the brutality of a three-week Russian occupation. (Video: Whitney Leaming, Jon Gerberg, James Cornsilk/The Washington Post) Politically, Russian President Vladimir Putin “was able to defend this,” said Law, a former deputy chief of mission at the Australian Embassy in Moscow. “Partly through controlling the information narrative, but also because this is now seen as a war against the West.” With many families afraid to speak out and no reliable number of victims, independent media and rights groups are keeping their own accounts. Their numbers, based only on confirmed open source death reports, are modest. Independent Russian media Mediazona and BBC News Russian counted 5,185 war dead as of July 29, with the heaviest losses in remote and impoverished areas such as the southern region of Dagestan and the Siberian region of Buryatia. The wealthy cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg barely touched, the two stores concluded. Moscow, with a population of 12.5 million, lost just 11 soldiers and St. Petersburg, 35. On the contrary, the CIA and the British intelligence agency MI6 estimate that at least 15,000 Russians have been killed since their country’s invasion of Ukraine in late February, casualties equal to the Soviet Union’s decade-long war in Afghanistan. And that was “probably a conservative estimate,” MI6 chief Richard Moore told the Aspen Security Forum last month. Chubarin’s death was an ominous reflection of the desperation of the Russian army. A former conscript from the Karelia region, he signed a three-month contract and was too excited to ask how much he would be paid. His mother, Nina Chubarina, believes that he wanted to prove himself as a man. She wonders if he was trying to win his ex-wife back. “She knew it was dangerous,” she said in a recent interview. He left on May 11, sending happy messages and videos after arriving in Belgorod, southern Russia. He trained very little in his four days there and then hurriedly called home. He had been given a machine gun and was heading off to war. “That was it. That was the last time we spoke,” she said. The military said he was found dead near Mariupol on May 16. “He was a very brave guy, he wasn’t afraid of anything. He was so happy and open and so kind.” Tsubarina, a dairy farmer, does not question the war. She’s just re-reading a poem her son sent her when he was in the military in 2017, about growing up and leaving her behind: “Forgive me for all the pain that has fallen on your weary shoulders. Please accept my soldier’s bow. It is from the bottom of my heart.” Sergey Dustin from Baltic refuses to be quiet. His daughter, Alexandra, married a marine named Maxim and was widowed at 19. He vented his anger on Facebook, saying the Russians should be asking why their sons were dying. He described the war as “a carnage started by crazy old men who think they are grand geopoliticians and super generals, incapable in reality of anything but destruction, threats against the world, puffing out their cheeks and endless lies.” Some responses called him a traitor. His son-in-law had left in the winter for “training exercises” and ended up in Ukraine. An old friend from Ukraine was fighting on the other side. Dustin hoped neither of them would die. He refused to hear details of how the young man died and his daughter closed in on her grief. “It’s very difficult for her to understand and acknowledge that her husband was involved in an operation that, to put it mildly, was not nice at all,” he said. “This whole story just brings sadness and tragedy to everyone.” Not many grieving families publicly question the war effort. The silence serves to minimize public understanding of its impact on the home front. In the eastern Siberian city of Ulan-Ude, a recent investigation by the independent news site Lyudi Baikala found that few residents knew that more than 250 people from the area had been killed, a count the site calculated using open sources. However, cracks have appeared. In Buryatia, a group of Russian soldiers’ wives made a video in June to demand that the army bring their men home. Hundreds of soldiers from the region have contacted a group of activists there for information on how to break their contracts, according to Alexandra Garmazhapova, founder of the Free Buryatia Foundation. The victims on a local VKontakte memorial page are increasing every day. On Monday, the deaths of local basketball players Dmitry Lagunov and Nikolai Bagrov were confirmed. A woman named Raisa Dugarova answered the page. “Why does Buryatia have to bury her sons every day?” asked. “Why are we doing this?” The next day there was another entry, about the death of Zolto Chimitov, a corporal in his 30s who had been born in the rural village of Chakir. He became a boxing champion, later training to become a forester. He had three children. “God, please stop this war. How many of our men can die?’ wrote a woman named Yevgenia Yakovleva. “My soul is freed from pain. I don’t know how to accept it, survive and live with it.”