3.23.22
VORONEZH — 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. According to local journalists, on Christmas Day 2015, the priest was granted a personal meeting with President Vladimir Putin, who was visiting town. At Sunday services, Maybachs and Rolls Royces belonging to the loyal elite line up outside his church on the edges of 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.”
Four days before the funeral, on March 12, a military commandant had arrived at the Ulyashev family's home to report that their son had died in Ukraine. 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. "How can you be sure it's him? We were told to just accept that he is no more,” said Kirill’s friend, 20-year-old Ira Fedorova. On Feb. 26, Kirill wrote to his family from the forests north of Kyiv, telling them that everything was alright. The next day he was dead, killed on the approaches to the Ukrainian capital. About 50 people laid red carnations atop the coffin. After that, the body was again loaded into the hearse and taken to a rag-tag cemetery just across from a small supermarket. An officer in his 30s from Ulyshev's airborne brigade showed up and re-told the circumstances of the young man's death to the gathered mourners. “Kirill died in the village of Bucha near Kyiv. Their group carried out a combat mission and encountered the Nazis. The soldiers completed their task in full. Unfortunately, in this battle we lost our paratrooper brother, our comrade.
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