The family of a man mobilized from Yekaterinburg who died in Ukraine was given the remains of another soldier. Relatives of the Ural resident told E1.RU that after the error was discovered, they had to organize a second funeral at their own expense.
Corporal Ivan A. died in a hospital in Rostov-on-Don in early December. A week before he was seriously wounded, as E1.RU writes, the news on Channel One talked about how he “discovered saboteurs” and “destroyed their machine gun crew.” E1.RU does not name the name of the deceased mobilized person. Probably, we are talking about Corporal Ivan Andreev, about whom Komsomolskaya Pravda also wrote under the heading “Heroes of Special Operation Z”.
“Corporal Ivan Andreev carried out a combat mission to search for enemy sabotage and reconnaissance groups <…>. Fire from standard weapons destroyed the machine gun crew and some of the militants who offered resistance. <…> Thanks to the courage and dedication of Corporal Ivan Andreev, the plans of an enemy sabotage and reconnaissance group to reveal the positions of Russian troops were thwarted,” the publication reported on December 1 last year.
The wife identified her husband's body in a Rostov hospital and returned home, waiting for a zinc coffin to be delivered to her.
“On December 30, the military registration and enlistment office of the Chkalovsky district [of Yekaterinburg] said that the body had been brought and the funeral was planned for January 3. <…> January 3: cars, coffin, tears, grave, funeral service, orchestra, dining room for 150 people. Do you understand how much this cost, taking into account the fact that it was a non-working day?” — a relative of a mobilized man named Lyubov told reporters.
Five days later, on January 8, the relatives of the deceased received a call from the military registration and enlistment office again and were informed that they had buried another person, but had just brought the corporal’s body. As a result, Ivan’s family had to exhume someone else’s remains, and they were able to bury their relative only on January 15.
The mobilized man’s relatives note that they organized the funeral at their own expense. The military registration and enlistment office promised to provide compensation for the funeral — 48 thousand rubles — only after the farewell ceremony. The Commissioner for Human Rights in the Sverdlovsk Region, Tatyana Merzlyakova, told E1.RU that the exhumation and reburial “were not paid for by the relatives of the deceased soldier.”
At the same time, according to the corporal’s relative, they had to rebury Ivan at their own expense, and now they can only receive compensation through the court. The mobilized man’s relatives turned to United Russia deputy Maxim Ivanov for help. She told E1.RU that she is preparing “a request to the military prosecutor’s office so that they check the actions of the military registration and enlistment office employees, why they did not double-check the body.”