Russia's Buryatia runs out of divorce certificate forms as families fall apart due to 'conflict'

New Delhi: Buryatia, the most impoverished region of Russia, has run out of divorce certificate forms as it is witnessing an unprecedented surge in the number of families falling apart, apparently due to the Russia-Ukraine war.

The information was shared on Twitter by Nexta, the largest Eastern European media, which captioned the post “Divorce certificate forms have run out in Buryatia due to the fact that too many families are falling apart.”

Reports by independent local media outlets, indicate that Buryatia, and other republics far away from the Kremlin, have been disproportionately affected by the conflict.

“It is becoming clear that a lot of the soldiers who are dying are from the poorer ‘ethnic minority’ republics like Buryatia, Kalmykia and Dagestan,” The Guardian quoted Pavel Luzin, a Russian military expert, as saying.

Ludi Baikala, a small independent media outlet that covers the region, has so far identified and named 45 soldiers from Buryatia who have died in Ukraine, but it believes the real number is much higher.

“The 45 are just the ones we managed to identify. There will be many more that are not talked about,” the report quoted Olga Mutovina, a journalist for Ludi Baikala, as saying.

Many soldiers from Buryatia fighting in Ukraine, including two of the men who were buried on Monday, are part of the 11th Guards Air Assault Brigade, which participated in the crucial battle for the Antonov airport two days into the invasion.

But while the scale of the current conflict is unprecedented in modern Russian history, the country has a history of using Buryat soldiers to achieve its military goals.

In 2015, numerous independent media outlets reported that a tank battalion from Buryatia was sent to Donbas to fight alongside Russian-backed separatists against the Ukrainian army, a conflict in which Russia has always denied involvement.

Pointing to the war of 2015 and the present invasion, Luzin said there was also a darker, more cynical reason why scores of soldiers from the country’s more remote republics have been dying.

“Unfortunately, the average Russian will care less about the death of a Buryat or Dagestani than about the death of blue-eyed soldiers from Moscow and St Petersburg,” Luzin said.

“That also goes into the minds of those planning military operations. Buryat soldiers get sent on missions on which commanders wouldn’t send other troops.”

Some local anger has started to spread over the increasingly noticeable number of Buryat soldiers dying.

Vyacheslav Markhaev, a member of the state duma from Buryatia has been one of the few officials in the country who have condemned the war, accusing President Vladimir Putin of “hiding plans to unleash a full-scale war with our closest neighbour”.

Russia is divided into 85 federal subjects, 22 of which are republics, originally created as regions to represent areas of non-Russian ethnicity.

Buryatia, lying between Lake Baikal and Mongolia at the eastern end of Siberia, is one of the most impoverished of Russia’s regions, with an average monthly salary of just 44,000 rubles (£390), despite holding some of the country’s largest deposits of natural resources. Between 30% and 40% of its 1 million population are ethnic Buryats who traditionally practise a mixture of Buddhism and shamanism.

With inputs from agencies

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