Russia is so desperate to hide its military involvement in Ukraine that it has brought in mobile crematoriums to destroy the bodies of its war dead, say U.S. lawmakers who traveled to the war-torn country this spring.
The U.S. and NATO have long maintained that thousands of Russian troops are fighting alongside separatists inside eastern Ukraine, and that the Russian government is obscuring not only the presence but also the deaths of its soldiers there. In March, NATO Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow told a conference, "Russian leaders are less and less able to conceal the fact that Russian soldiers are fighting -- and dying -- in large numbers in eastern Ukraine."
Hence the extreme measures to get rid of the evidence. “The Russians are trying to hide their casualties by taking mobile crematoriums with them,†House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry told me. “They are trying to hide not only from the world but from the Russian people their involvement.â€
Thornberry said he had seen evidence of the crematoriums from both U.S. and Ukrainian sources. He said he could not disclose details of classified information, but insisted that he believed the reports. “What we have heard from the Ukrainians, they are largely supported by U.S. intelligence and others,†he said.
Representative Seth Moulton, a former Marine Corps officer and a Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, was with Thornberry on the Ukraine trip in late March. He tweeted about the mobile crematoriums at the time, but didn’t reveal his sources. He told me this week the information didn’t come just from Ukrainian officials, whose record of providing war intelligence to U.S. lawmakers isn’t stellar.
“We heard this from a variety of sources over there, enough that I was confident in the veracity of the information,†Moulton said, also being careful not to disclose classified U.S. intelligence.
Both Thornberry and Moulton agreed with Vershbow's assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin was struggling to keep up the ruse that he has no soldiers fighting inside Ukraine. Moulton said the mounting evidence of dead Russian soldiers is causing a domestic backlash for Putin. Russian and Ukrainian bloggers and activists have been compiling lists of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine, including details of their service and circumstances of their deaths. New organizations in Russia representing soldiers’ families have sprung up to publicly challenge Putin's narrative.
“Russia is clearly having a problem with their home front and the casualties they are taking from the war,†Moulton said. “The fact that they would resort to burning the bodies of their own soldiers is horrific and shameful.â€
There had been unconfirmed reports of Russia using mobile crematoriums in Ukraine for months, including leaked videos purporting to show them. But never before have U.S. lawmakers confirmed that American officials also believe the claims.
The head of Ukraine’s security service, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, said in January that seven truck-mounted crematoriums crossed into his country over a four-day period. "Each of these crematoriums burns 8-10 bodies per day," he said.
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-05-26/putin-burns-his-dead-to-hide-ukraine-aggression
