He heeded Russia's call to enlist. Five months later he was dead.

Pvt. Ivan Ovlashenko was one of at least 16,000 Russians who died in Ukraine, more than during the Soviets' Afghan war. It is becoming difficult for the Kremlin to cover this up.

Soon after deploying to Ukraine last fall, Pvt. Ivan A. Ovlashenko filmed a short video of himself dressed in camouflage fatigues and an olive green fleece hat, sitting in a wood strewn with yellowing leaves while other soldiers nearby readied a shell. artillery to fire towards the Ukrainian lines.

"I'm recording everything correctly", he said smiling before shouting a warning: "Mortar!" The clip was meant to reassure loved ones back in Russia that his sudden transition to frontline gunner was going very well.

Until this is not the case.

Last September, President Vladimir V. Putin ordered the mobilization of 300,000 troops to bolster the weakened Russian defenses in Ukraine. At the time, the hordes of men fleeing Russia to avoid conscription attracted the most attention. Yet hundreds of thousands of Russians like Private Ovlashenko - factory workers and electricians, orderlies and basketball players, tractor drivers and school workers - went off to war.

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">The promise of payments of $3,000 or $4,000 per month proved to be a huge incentive, as well as calls for machismo and defense of the fatherland. "What am I, not a man?" Mr. Ovlashenko told two women, his sister and his ex-wife. "I have to protect my country, girl."

Video Video provided by Mr. Ovlashenko's family shows Mr. Ovlashenko filming himself as fellow soldiers nearby prepared an artillery shell to fire towards the Ukrainian lines.

In lengthy interviews, the Women said they were surprised to see how Mr. Ovlashenko, largely apolitical until now, suddenly began to reproduce the government's wacky talk about the West considering using the Ukraine as a base from which to attack Russia. If he wasn't fighting in Ukraine, he says, he would have to fight the enemy on the streets of Bataysk, his hometown, a railroad hub just outside the southwestern city of Rostov-on-Don .

Mobilization changed the calculus of war. It was no longer a remote “military operation,” as the Kremlin still calls it, carried out by Ukrainian contract soldiers, mercenaries and separatists rushing into service. Suddenly, ordinary Russians were pushed into the trenches.

Now, more than five months later, the pace of dead and wounded returning to Russia is accelerating, with the arrival of zinc coffins in places like Bataysk. It's a pattern that repeats itself across Russia, though the dead remain largely hidden.

"The numbers are secret," said political analyst Max Trudolyubov Russian and press columnist. based in Vilnius, Lithuania. “The mobilized come from small towns, from distant places. The strategy is to spread the losses as finely as possible across the country. Belongings of Russian soldiers are seen among burned vehicles outside Lyman in eastern Ukraine in October. that 200,000 troops on the...