Ukraine war: The Russian region with high casualties where an army contract is big money
Buryatia feels like it is a world away from war in Europe.
It is a different Russia. Vast snowy plains and Buddhist temples, closer at first glance to Mongolia next door than it is to Moscow, five time zones away.
But the motifs of Russia’s war in Ukraine are everywhere.
A huge Z and V stuck to the side of an apartment building we pass. Another giant V sign on the side of the world’s largest Lenin’s head in the centre of the regional capital, Ulan-Ude.
Along the sides of the roads, billboards commemorating some of the men Buryatia has lost this past year with the dates they were killed and the words: “We love, we remember, we mourn.”
We meet a young man just back from Kazakhstan where he’d gone to escape the draft.
He’d been there for two months but wasn’t sure how to keep financing himself.
“This is a poor, subsidised region,” he says.
“People here live on loans in order to survive and the propaganda tells them all the time that they will make money if they go and fight.”
Buryatia is on Mongolia’s doorstep
An army contract is big money in Buryatia which is perhaps why, alongside enthusiastic recruitment policies, it has suffered a disproportionately high casualty rate in this war.
The numbers are hard to verify but there does appear to be some correlation between poor, ethnic minority regions like Buryatia or Dagestan, and high casualty counts.
We spoke to a woman called Polina, not her real name, whose two nephews had signed up for the army and were on what they thought were just training exercises in Belarus when Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine.
After a few weeks, both men asked to terminate their contracts but they were turned down.
Polina says one was placed in custody and the other was threatened with execution.
She says: “The commander actually put a gun to his head. And my nephew said ‘Okay, do it! I’d rather die now than go back, where they’ll either make me an invalid or I’ll have to kill someone’.”
He was eventually allowed to go home.
‘Not all of us are bloodthirsty’
In the early months of the war, ethnic Buryats were widely accused across Ukrainian social media of alleged atrocities, especially in relation to Bucha.
The NGO Free Buryatia Foundation, currently based outside of Russia, describes the “Buryats in Bucha” as the “biggest myth of the war” and has endeavoured to prove via open source investigations that ethnic Buryats were unfairly singled out as culpable for war crimes, in part because of their distinctive ethnicity.
Polina can’t accept the allegations. “I want the world to know that not all Buryats support the war,” she says.
“Not all of us are bloodthirsty, we’re not bloodthirsty at all. We were made to look like that.”
It is difficult to find people who’ll speak to Western media here. It is much safer to stay quiet. We were on our way to interview a man who had lost 20 friends in the war when his wife sent us a message.
Consequences for posting on social media
“State repressions are already under way,” she wrote.
“Even for a repost on a social network, young people are imprisoned/tried/fined. I can’t take that risk. My great-grandfather was repressed only because of the suspicions of the government and it led to nothing good for the family.”
She refused to let him do the interview.
Which is why Elena Pavlova is so remarkably brave. She lives in Ulan-Ude. We came across her because she had written a post on social media declaring herself categorically opposed to the war.
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“It seems to me that people in Russia do not believe in themselves,” Ms Pavlova says.
“There are many who support Putin and believe that without him, the country will fall apart. And everyone just gives up.”
Read more:
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The airport in Ulan-Ude
She has considered leaving the country, like the hundreds of thousands of others who feel its values no longer reflect their own. But she doesn’t know how she would fund herself or her young daughter.
She says when the war started she had more faith in the Russian people but that she has lost that completely.
“Let’s say we keep staying silent. How do we keep living in this country then? How do we live in these circumstances? Among these people? I don’t know.”
The Syrian presidency has announced it’s assembling a special taskforce to try to stop nearly a week of sectarian clashes in the southern Druze city of Sweida.
The presidency called for restraint on all sides and said it is making strenuous efforts to “stop the fighting and curb the violations that threaten the security of the citizens and the safety of society”.
By early Saturday morning, a ceasefire had been confirmed by the US special envoy for Syria, Tom Barrack, who posted on X that Syrian President Ahmed al Sharaa and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had agreed to a ceasefire supported by US secretary of state Marco Rubio.
The post went on to state that this agreement had the support of “Turkey, Jordan and its neighbours” and called upon the Druze, Bedouins, and Sunni factions to put down their arms.
Sky News special correspondent Alex Crawford reports from the road leading to Sweida, the city that has become the epicentre of Syria’s sectarian violence.
For the past 24 hours, we’ve watched as Syria‘s multiple Arab tribes began mobilising in the Sweida province to help defend their Bedouin brethren.
Thousands travelled from multiple different Syrian areas and had reached the edge of Sweida city by Friday nightfall after a day of almost non-stop violent clashes and killings.
“We have come to protect the [Arab] Bedouin women and children who are being terrorised by the Druze,” they told us.
Arab fighters said they had come to protect the Bedouin women and children
Fighters at a petrol station
Every shop and every home in the streets leading up to Sweida city has been burned or ransacked, the contents destroyed or looted.
We saw tribal fighters loading the back of pickup trucks and driving away from the city with vehicles packed with looted goods from Druze homes.
Shops and homes leading up to Sweida city have been burned or ransacked
Several videos posted online showed violence against the Druze, including one where tribal fighters force three men to throw themselves off a high-rise balcony and are seen being shot as they do so.
Doctors at the nearby community hospital in Buser al Harir said there had been a constant stream of casualties being brought in. As we watched, another dead fighter was carried out of an ambulance.
The medics estimated there had been more than 600 dead in their area alone. “The youngest child who was killed was a one-and-a-half-year-old baby,” one doctor told us.
Doctors said there had been a constant stream of casualties due to violence
The violence is the most dangerous outbreak of sectarian clashes since the fall of the Bashar al Assad regime last December – and the most serious challenge for the new leader to navigate.
The newly brokered deal is aimed at ending the sectarian killings and restoring some sort of stability in a country which is emerging from more than a decade of civil war.
Israel and Syria have agreed to a ceasefire, the US ambassador to Turkey has said.
Several hundred people have reportedly been killed this week in the south of Syria in violence involving local fighters, government authorities and Bedouin tribes.
As the violence escalated in the southern province of Sweida, Israel launched airstrikes, including attacks on Wednesday on the defence ministry in Damascus and a target near the presidential palace.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government said it aimed to protect Syrian Druze – part of a small but influential minority that also has followers in Lebanon and Israel.
In a post on X, the US ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barrack, said Israel and Syria had agreed to a ceasefire supported by Turkey, Jordan and others.
“We call upon Druze, Bedouins, and Sunnis to put down their weapons and together with other minorities build a new and united Syrian identity,” Mr Barrack said in a post on X.
The Israeli embassy in Washington and Syrian Consulate in Canada did not immediately comment or respond to requests for comment from the Reuters news agency.
The ceasefire announcement came after the US worked to put an end to the conflict, with secretary of state Marco Rubio saying on Wednesday that steps had been agreed to end a “troubling and horrifying situation”.
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Why is Israel bombing Syria?
After Israel warned it would destroy forces attacking Syrian Druze, Syrian President Ahmed al Sharaa told the minority group in a televised statement on Thursday that “we reject any attempt to drag you into hands of an external party”.
He then claimed Israel has “consistently targeted our stability and created discord among us since the fall of the former regime”.
It comes after the United Nations’ migration agency said earlier on Friday that nearly 80,000 people had been displaced in the region since violence broke out on Sunday.
It also said that essential services, including water and electricity, had collapsed in Sweida, telecommunications systems were widely disrupted, and health facilities in Sweida and Daraa were under severe strain.
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At least three people have been killed after a “horrific incident” at a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department training facility, officials have said.
A spokesperson for the department said there was an explosion at the Biscailuz Center Academy Training in east LA.
The incident was reported at around 7.30am local time (3.30pm UK time).
Aerial footage from local channel KABC-TV suggests the blast happened in a parking lot filled with sheriff patrol cars and box trucks.
The training centre in east LA. Pic: NBC Los Angeles
Attorney general Pam Bondi wrote on X: “I just spoke to @USAttyEssayli about what appears to be a horrific incident that killed at least three at a law enforcement training facility in Los Angeles.
“Our federal agents are at the scene and we are working to learn more.”
California congressman Jimmy Sanchez said the explosion had “claimed the lives of at least three deputies”.
“My condolences to the families and everyone impacted by this loss,” he said.
Media and law enforcement officials near the explosion site. Pic: AP
The attorney general said in a follow-up post that agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are “on the ground to support”.
The mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, said the LAPD bomb squad has also responded to the scene.
“The thoughts of all Angelenos are with all of those impacted by this blast,” she said.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has been briefed on the incident, his press office said in a post on X.
“The Governor’s Office of Emergency Services is in contact with the Sheriff’s Department and closely monitoring the situation, and has offered full state assistance,” it added.
The cause of the explosion is being investigated.
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