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.”
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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.”
Jean-Marie Le Pen was variously loved and loathed – but he changed the shape of modern French politics.
His youth was shaped by war and he then lived a life of constant battles.
Le Pen’s political career, which was a very long one, was all about belligerence, anger, regret and scapegoats. In his world, everything that had gone wrong could be blamed on someone else.
French far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen has died
Mostly, his targets were either migrants or Muslims, or ideally migrants who were also Muslims. But he also berated bureaucrats, gay people and the Arab world in general.
He was convicted of inciting discrimination, downplayed the Holocaust as merely “a detail”, assaulted a fellow MP in the European Parliament and was eventually expelled from his own party – then led by his own daughter – for being an unapologetic extremist.
And yet it would be wrong to write Le Pen off as merely an agitator.
He was, instead, a catalyst within French politics – a lightning rod who edged far-right opinions back towards the mainstream. He maintained that France was for the French, a nationalist sentiment that resonates across so many countries to this day.
Le Pen was born in Brittany in 1928, the son of a fisherman and a seamstress. His father, Jean, was killed when his boat was blown up by a German mine during the Second World War but Le Pen went on to enjoy military life and served in Vietnam and Algeria. He bemoaned France’s withdrawal from its colonies and, as he saw it, the consequent loss of power and prestige.
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France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen dies
On his return to France, Le Pen moved into right-wing politics. He helped to form the National Front in 1972, uniting a disparate group of supporters. Emboldened, Le Pen ran for president in 1974, but ended up with less than 1% of the vote.
He had, however, started the process of establishing himself as a profoundly divisive figure.
In 1976, his apartment was bombed, blowing out a side of the building. Nobody was killed and the perpetrators were never caught.
But the violence of the attack against him seemed to energise Le Pen. And the following year, a wealthy supporter left him a new home – a mansion to the west of Paris built on the orders of Napoleon III. Le Pen, along with his three daughters – Marie-Caroline, Yann and Marine – all lived there.
Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter Marine Le Pen in 2012. Pic: Reuters
Their mother, Pierrette, separated from Le Pen because of his extreme views. He refused to pay alimony saying that “if she wants money, she can clean”. Instead, she accepted the offer to pose for semi-naked photos in Playboy magazine, wearing a maid’s outfit and pretending to clean. The magazine sold around 250,000 more copies than normal.
That crushing electoral defeat did not dissuade Le Pen. Instead, it was to be merely the first of five attempts to win the presidency. None would be successful but on one extraordinary occasion, in 2002, he came second in the first round of popular voting, with the backing of 4.8m voters.
It was a result that pushed Le Pen into a run-off against the sitting president, Jacques Chirac. Fearful of Le Pen’s extremism, Mr Chirac won backing from across the political spectrum and emerged with the biggest landslide in France’s modern history – 82% for him, 18% for Le Pen. Mr Chirac’s vote rose by nearly 20m votes from the first round – Le Pen’s tally went up by just 700,000.
Jean-Marie Le Pen. Pic: Reuters
The outcome said much about Le Pen. He had enthused many in the far-right with a rhetoric that seemed, at times, anti-establishment, racist, antisemitic, xenophobic and radical, but which also promised to do anything to protect France and the French.
Clearly, there were millions who would support it but, just as clearly, there were many more who would do anything to stop Le Pen, even if that might mean voting for the widely disliked Mr Chirac. “Rather a crook than a racist” was a familiar statement at the time.
The election marked the high-water mark for Le Pen’s career. In the coming years, his support fell. In 2011, he stood down as leader and was succeeded by his daughter Marine Le Pen.
Jean-Marie Le Pen with his daughter Marine. Pic: AP
Le Pen continued as an MEP, but his uncompromising views became ever more at odds with Ms Le Pen’s more emollient approach.
When Le Pen refused to apologise for yet another antisemitic comment, he was suspended, and then expelled, from the party he had founded. A little later, Ms Le Pen was to rename the party the Rassemblement National – the National Rally – to further distance herself from her father’s shadow.
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He started a new far-right party and continued campaigning, but by now he was a spent force. There was only space for one Le Pen, and Ms Le Pen had usurped him.
But her father’s influence lingered on. “His impact is still very great today,” said Dr Benjamin Biard, a political analyst specialising in the far right.
“It’s not just Jean-Marie Le Pen. There is the impact of Marine Le Pen who also changed the party, mainly in its structure, its symbols and the way it communicates. For everything else, it has remained generally faithful to the ideals of the National Front as Jean-Marie Le Pen designed it when the party was first founded.
“His ability, playing in his charisma and his way of communicating, has been very inspirational for other political organisations in other countries, particularly in Europe.”
Le Pen brought raw, unapologetic opinions that were, for many, unpalatable, offensive, divisive and sometimes even illegal, but which also helped to remould French politics.
He enjoyed the spotlight, spoke with passion, and enjoyed smiling, performing and shaking hands while the storm swirled around him. Le Pen was divisive and difficult, but he was also impossible to ignore.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the French far-right National Front party, has died aged 96.
Le Pen shook the French political establishment when he unexpectedly reached the presidential election run-off vote against Jacques Chirac in 2002.
Despite losing in a landslide, he rewrote the parameters of French politics in a career spanning multiple decades, harnessing voter discontent over immigration and job security – heralding president-elect Donald Trump’s own rise.
Throughout his career he faced accusations of racism, and his controversial statements included Holocaust denial.
Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Pic: Reuters
After leading the then-National Front from 1972 to 2011, he was succeeded as party chief by his daughter, Marine Le Pen.
She has since run for the presidency three times and turned the party, now called the National Rally, into one of the country’s main political forces.
Jordan Bardella, current president of the National Rally, confirmed Le Pen’s death on social media.
He said: “Today I am thinking with sadness of his family, his loved ones, and of course of Marine whose mourning must be respected.”
In a statement, the National Rally paid tribute to Le Pen.
It highlighted his early years spent fighting in some of France’s colonial wars, including in Algeria, and said he was a politician who was “certainly unruly and sometimes turbulent”.
It went on to say he brought forward the issues which define modern political debate in France.
“For the National Rally, he will remain the one who, in the storms, held in his hands the small flickering flame of the French Nation,” it added.
President Emmanuel Macron also expressed his condolences in a statement, saying: “A historic figure of the far right, he played a role in the public life of our country for nearly seventy years, which is now a matter for history to judge.”
Jean-Marie Le Pen and Marine Le Pen in 2012.
Pic: Reuters
A controversial career
Born in 1928, the son of a Breton fisherman, he was an intensely polarising figure known for his fiery rhetoric against immigration and multiculturalism that earned him both staunch supporters and widespread condemnation.
He made Islam, and Muslim immigrants, his primary targets, blaming them for the economic and social woes of France.
His controversial statements, including Holocaust denial and his 1987 proposal to forcibly isolate people with AIDS in special facilities, led to multiple convictions and strained his political alliances, including with his own daughter.
Accusations of racism followed him, and he was tried, convicted and fined for contesting war crimes after declaring that Nazi gas chambers were “merely a detail” of World War Two history.
“I stand by this because I believe it is the truth,” he said in 2015 when asked if he regretted the comment.
He had 11 prior convictions, including for violence against a public official and antisemitic hate speech.
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His death comes as his daughter faces a potential prison term, and ban on running for political office, if convicted in an embezzling trial currently underway.
She was thousands of miles away in the French territory of Mayotte, inspecting the aftermath of Cyclone Chido at the time of her father’s death.
Le Pen himself was exempted from prosecution over health grounds in the high-profile trial.
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