Fallen, Forgotten Warriors Are Bitter Legacy for Russia

In the town of Verkhoturye in the Ural Mountains, two families grieve for sons who died for the Russian military, neither of them yet recovered and buried.

Yevgeny Lyubimkin disappeared at age 20 in the 1994-96 Chechen war, while his neighbor across the street, Ivan Nefyodkov, died at 19 on board the nuclear submarine Kursk, which sank in the Barents Sea in August.

It took less than two weeks for Russian authorities to announce big compensation payments for the families of the dead crew members aboard the Kursk. But it took five to six years to bury the bones of 10 unknown soldiers who were killed in the early part of the first Chechen war and finally laid to rest here Monday, 32 miles east of Moscow.

Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, a determined proponent of the war to defeat separatist rebels in Chechnya, was not there to mourn Monday, nor was Defense Minister Igor D. Sergeyev. The most senior official present was Col. Gen. Valery L. Manilov, first deputy chief of the armed forces’ general staff.

To Yevgeny’s mother, Galina Lyubimkin, 49, the official indifference to soldiers who died or went missing in Chechnya is hurtful, particularly in comparison with the response to the Kursk tragedy.

Though she does not believe that her son was among the 10 anonymous soldiers buried Monday, or the 56 to be buried in coming days, she came to mourn and scatter earth into the graves along with dozens of other mothers of men missing in action.

Some of the coffins contain only a few unidentified fragments of bone. These were men who died terrible deaths that left their remains badly charred and unsuitable for DNA testing. Most perished in burning tanks and armored personnel carriers.

As the coffins were lowered, the notes of Russia’s provisional national anthem died away amid the sobbing of mothers.

Anna Pesetskaya, a member of the presidential commission on missing soldiers and POWs, said during the service that many mothers still hope their sons are alive.

“There are mothers here who have gone through all of this war but who are still looking for their sons,” she said.

The public grieving over the Kursk tragedy, however, reopened the wounds of those who lost loved ones in Chechnya.

Already, officials at the school in Verkhoturye where submariner Ivan Nefyodkov spent two years are discussing the possibility of renaming the school after him.

“My son was at that school his whole life, from A to Z,” said Galina Lyubimkin, upset that Yevgeny’s fate did not attract such notice.

Her family also was bitterly hurt by news of the $26,000 in compensation granted to the Nefyodkov family and other survivors of the Kursk victims.

The standard payment for the death of a contract soldier is 3,600 rubles ($129.50), plus 750 rubles ($26.90) for each immediate family member. For soldiers missing in action, such as Yevgeny Lyubimkin, families get 400 rubles ($14.40) a month.

“My heart aches because this boy from the Kursk was a soldier and a warrior. But the way our sons are treated, it makes us wonder who our sons are. Aren’t they soldiers too? Aren’t they warriors, that they get treated this way?” Galina Lyubimkin said Monday.

One reason for the disparity is Putin’s personal involvement in the compensation package for the Kursk victims. The president was savaged by the Russian media for remaining on a Black Sea vacation during the rescue attempt mounted for the sub, but after his belated return, he tried to undo the damage by meeting with bereaved relatives and promising generous remuneration.

Although there have been questions in the Russian media about the differences in compensation, Russian officials have brushed them aside. The government minister in charge of the Kursk compensation payments, Deputy Prime Minister Valentina Matviyenko, said recently that it is wrong to compare the Kursk compensation package with what is paid in the deaths of servicemen killed in action.

In January 1995, a local government official called the Lyubimkin family to tell it that Yevgeny had been killed in the storming of the Chechen capital, Grozny, on New Year’s Eve 1994 and that his body was on the way home.

But the body never came.

“We still have hope that maybe he’s still alive. We’ll keep waiting until the day we die,” his mother said.

The compensation disparity has already caused ill feeling between her and neighbor Alevtina Nefyodkov, Ivan’s mother.

“I am so sick and tired of people around me looking at my family with envy,” Nefyodkov said in a phone interview Monday. “I’m not to blame for the fact that I got treated better than the Lyubimkins. People really shouldn’t envy me. Do they really think this money will replace my son or bring him back?”

Valentina Epifanov, 42, from the Sverdlovsk region in the Urals, was also at the burial service Monday. She spent 2 1/2 years in Chechnya with her husband searching for her son, Alexei.

“After the Kursk, we realized that our sons are nobody to the military. They’re just meat,” said Epifanov.

She and her husband went to Chechnya in January 1995 after a Russian journalist phoned to say he had met Alexei, who was a prisoner of the Chechen side. In 1997, some Chechen fighters told the family that Alexei had been killed by a Russian warplane.

“We dug the body up with our bare hands,” Epifanov said. “It was lying in a rut in a barren field with dirt piled on top of it. But it was impossible to recognize him.”

After an analysis, they learned that the body was not Alexei’s.

“I don’t believe he’s dead. I’ll never reconcile myself to that. Even if all the unidentified bodies are buried, I’ll still be waiting for him because I still believe he’s alive,” Epifanov said.

According to official figures, just under 4,000 men died in the 1994-96 war. About 600 are still listed as missing, including 264 whose remains at the military morgue in Rostov-on-Don have not been identified.

In the present war, which has continued for nearly a year, about 2,700 servicemen have died, although the Soldiers’ Mothers Committee estimates the casualties in both wars to be almost three times the official toll.

As dirt was shoveled over the coffins in Noginsk on Monday, the armed forces’ Manilov told journalists that there can be no end to the war until the last Chechen rebel is killed.

“The people know that they must take it [the war] for as long as it takes to destroy the bandits,” he said.

But support for the war is declining, and for the mothers of the dead and missing at the ceremonies Monday, the conflict is offensive and senseless.

“It’s an outrageous war, a reckless war. No one needed it,” said Olga Melnikov from Stavropol in southern Russia, whose 18-year-old, Andrei, disappeared in August 1996 when Chechen fighters defeated the Russians in a huge battle in Grozny.

“Our sons were just written off. But today, the sun is shining for them,” she said.

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Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.