Ryazan, not far from Moscow, regularly sends young men off to fight. Some are now buried in the local cemetery, but there is no surge of outrage against Russian leaders
Natalia cleaning the grave of her son at a cemetery in Ryazan, Russia, in December. He was killed near Kyiv in the first days of the Ukraine war.
By Valerie Hopkins
Photographs by Nanna Heitmann
Valerie Hopkins, who covers Russia for The Times, and the photographer Nanna Heitmann reported this month from Ryazan, a city a few hours from Moscow. They found little opposition to the war in Ukraine, and much pride in the city’s strong military tradition.
Dec. 27, 2022, 12:09 a.m. ET
Even under a thick coating of snow, the graveyard for Russian soldiers killed in the Ukraine war is awash in color. Graves are heaped with wreaths of plastic flowers and, at each mound, flags representing the dead soldier’s unit whip in the wind.
On a recent Saturday, a woman named Natalia grasped a brush and carefully swept clumps of sticky fresh snow off her son’s wreaths. She removed the red carnations she had brought the week before, now frozen, replacing them with a small Christmas tree she purchased at the cemetery entrance.
Natalia comes at least once a week to care for the grave of her only son, who was killed in the first days of the war, after his group of soldiers swept into Ukraine and tried and failed to secure the Hostomel airfield, near Kyiv. What was left of his body arrived in Ryazan several weeks later.
“Even when I’m sick, I come here, because I worry he’s going to be bored,” she said of her son, whose remains arrived just shy of his 26th birthday. She declined to provide her surname, fearing retribution for speaking out.
Many Western opponents of Russia’s war in Ukraine expected that mothers like Natalia would become the backbone of a surge of outrage against President Vladimir V. Putin, and evolve into a political force opposing him. But 10 months into the conflict, that has not happened on a large scale — and certainly not in Ryazan, a city of half a million people known for its elite paratrooper unit.
Natalia said that she thought the invasion “should have been planned better,” in order to minimize losses, but she expressed no anger at Russia’s leadership. “Something had to be done,” she said, referring to Ukraine.