Family of dead Russian soldier who are demanding compensation are found to have a Ukrainian refrigerator
Diana Krechetova – Staff reporter, Ukrainska Pravda.Zhyttia 18 July 2022
A video has been posted about the family of a Russian occupier who was killed by the Kremlin regime.
As part of the "Should we talk?" project, Russian journalist Irina Shikhman made a film in which the foster parents of Ilya Vasilenko, a Russian soldier who was killed, complain about the lack of compensation from the state for his death. The film is called "They only gave money for his coffin and gravestone. How does a Russian family get compensation for the death of a soldier?"
Vasilenko’s relatives insist that he "never wanted to offend anyone", but one detail that caught Ukrainian journalists’ attention has exposed the Russian soldier as a looter.
Clearly visible in the footage is a refrigerator with a sticker on it which reads "2-year full warranty" [in Ukrainian], which could have been exported from Ukraine.
Vasilenko died in Ukraine on the second day of the full-scale war. The "liberator" came to Ukraine from the village of Chunsky, in Irkutsk Oblast. It is approximately 4,500 kilometres away from Ukraine.
As Shikhman notes in the film, the Russian authorities pay compensation for a death only to the parents, children or wife of the deceased. In other words, foster parents are not entitled to any payout.
"The Military Commissariat only gave money for his coffin and gravestone. If you don’t like it, go and sue them," commented the journalist.
While Shikhman was conducting an interview in the kitchen, the Beko refrigerator with the "2-year full warranty" sticker was captured on camera.
Ukrainians have already started making jokes about it online.
Blogger and TV presenter Ivan Marunych shared what he thinks the main difference is between a Ukrainian refrigerator and a Russian occupier:
"What’s the difference between a refrigerator and an occupier son? The refrigerator will last longer."
Meanwhile journalist Vitalii Tysiachnyi noted that in trying to show the world the family of a "simple Russian soldier" who died in Ukraine, the Russians have exposed him as a looter.
"The entire story is about the fact that the state withheld the family's payment for Cargo 200 [killed soldiers - ed.] and they only received a handout ‘for his coffin and gravestone’. The relatives are in tears, everyone around is bad, life is hard, it wasn’t his fault, he didn’t kill anyone, things aren’t that simple, etc.
Basically, they’re trying to drum up sympathy for ‘ordinary Russians’. But towards the end of the video, the camera focuses on the refrigerator in this family's house, and it’s... Ukrainian. So the family of the ‘honest’ Russian soldier killed in Ukraine has a stolen Ukrainian refrigerator? Do stores in remote Siberia (Irkutsk) issue a ‘2-year warranty’?" Tysiachnyi emphasises.
Journalist Olha Karetnikova-Kotiahina called the Ukrainian refrigerator taken to a Russian backwater by a soldier who died attacking Ukraine a "marker of a failed nation".
Read also: Evacuation in a wheelchair: a disabled woman’s experience of escaping from the occupiers in Bucha
Journalist Viktoriia Kobyliatska suggests that instead of compensation for the death of a Russian soldier, his foster parents have already received a refrigerator.
"They are interviewing the relatives of the dead Russian. Saying ‘he never offended anyone in his life.’ Of course that’s how it was. Perhaps that’s why he was brought to Russia in a stolen refrigerator? Did this refrigerator arrive later as compensation for the family? For some reason the journalists didn’t ask about that, and that’s a shame, because the full warranty sticker is intriguing, and it’s the only thing that could make this failed interview truly informative," she emphasises.
According to Ukrainians, Russian journalists’ attempts to justify Russian soldiers using Vasilenko and his family as an example are futile.
