August 25, 2024: The heavy losses suffered in Ukraine, which include several hundred thousand dead and even more disabled troops, led the government to develop a plan for hundreds of war memorials in areas, usually rural towns, where most of the dead soldiers came from. When the fighting in Ukraine intensified after the initial quick victory was not achieved, Russia found it was suffering far more casualties than anticipated. Most of the soldiers came from rural areas as military age men living in the cities are better educated and have access to well-paying jobs. The government recognizes this, and the fact that there are not a lot of soldiers, including officers, from the big cities getting killed in Ukraine. The war seems more distant to the people living in the cities and the national media outlets that are based there.

Despite the urban populations avoiding a lot of Ukraine war casualties, the government was mindful of the poor morale in the rural areas where most of the soldiers came from. This was where families of most dead soldiers lived and they were not happy with the Russian Special Operation in Ukraine. This is what the government called its Ukraine invasion and Russians soon realized that this Special Operation, which was supposed to be over quickly, has gone on for over two years.

That last time Russia launched an invasion of a neighboring country was in 1940 when Russia sought to take control of neighboring Finland by force. The Finns fought back fiercely. The battles were in the winter and Russian losses were so high that Russia made peace with Finland. The Finns joined the Nazis when Germany invaded in 1941 but attacked only areas the Russians had taken from them and carefully avoided threatening Leningrad or the vital railroad to northern Murmansk. Because of that, after the war the Russian government only took some but not much more territory from Finland while leaving Finland independent.

The Russian people know that Finland, now a NATO member, continues to keep the peace along its 1,340 kilometer border with Russia. Then there is the 2,000 kilometer border Russia shares with Ukraine. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was, like the Russian invasion of Finland, an expensive, for the Russians, mistake. This time Russia did not have a non-aggression pact with Ukraine, like they had with Germany to use when the two nations invaded Poland in 1939. Poland was quickly overwhelmed and Polish territory was divided between Germany and Russia. That arrangement ended in 1941 when Germany invaded Russia and took control over all of Poland and proceeded to murder nearly six million Poles during the war, half of them Jews.

Poland never forgot their World War II experience and, after the Cold War ended in 1991 and Russian influence in Poland was eliminated, the Poles joined NATO and have been ardent supporters of Ukraine since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. NATO is a defensive organization and if anyone, like Russia, attacks a NATO member, they are automatically at war with all 32 NATO countries, including the United States, France and Britain, which all have nuclear weapons. One reason Russia invaded Ukraine was that Ukraine was planning to join NATO. Russia had threatened Ukraine over Ukrainian NATO membership and that only made Ukrainians more eager to get into NATO as soon as possible. NATO subsequently agreed to make Ukraine its 33rd member once the Russians are driven out of Ukraine. This would be a nightmare for Russia and leader Vladimir Putin has promised peace with Ukraine and implied possibly even return of the 25 percent of Ukraine currently occupied by Russia, if Ukraine does not join NATO.

Because the Russian invasion of Ukraine has failed, the Russian government has a problem with Russian regions where most of its troops came from. Most of those soldiers were killed or wounded and the government response has been the construction and installation of hundreds of war memorials in rural towns where most of the dead soldiers came from. While local officials express gratitude for these memorial statues, the residents of these towns are less impressed. Most of the people in these places know someone who was killed in Ukraine or know a family that lost someone. The civilians see the statues as another cynical move by the government to take advantage of the deaths of these men. Angry locals know that defacing or criticizing these memorials will get you arrested, just as open criticism of the war did earlier.

The government will eventually realize, if they haven’t already, that the memorials not only honor the dead but remind Russians that it was their own government that got these men killed. There will never be any memorials to that truth.