Pro-Russia rebels carry a coffin with the body of prominent separatist commander Alexei Mozgovoi during his funeral in Alchevsk, Ukraine, Wednesday, May 27, 2015. Alexei Mozgovoi and at least six other people were killed on Saturday in eastern Ukraine when his vehicle was ripped apart by a bomb and then strafed by gunfire. (AP Photo/Mstyslav Chernov)
Today’s sick-making story comes from eastern Ukraine, where Russian Army troops are using portable crematoria to conceal their own dead:
The U.S. and NATO have long maintained that thousands of Russian troops are fighting alongside separatists inside eastern Ukraine, and that the Russian government is obscuring not only the presence but also the deaths of its soldiers there. In March, NATO Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow told a conference, “Russian leaders are less and less able to conceal the fact that Russian soldiers are fighting — and dying — in large numbers in eastern Ukraine.”
Hence the extreme measures to get rid of the evidence. “The Russians are trying to hide their casualties by taking mobile crematoriums with them,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry told me. “They are trying to hide not only from the world but from the Russian people their involvement.”
The last time portable crematoria wear dragged through eastern Europe was during WWII, when the Germans used them to quickly dispose of Jews, Commissars, and other “undesirables.” So I suppose today’s news is something of an improvement over that.
But a reveal like this makes you wonder how much longer Vlad Putin can maintain the effectiveness of his own Big Lie regarding Russia’s direct military involvement in Ukraine.
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