The widows of Russian men killed fighting in Ukraine are increasingly counting on the troops’ frozen sperm to posthumously bear their children, according to a new report.
Olga Anufriyeva, 44, visited an IVF clinic in Russia’s Buryatia republic just a week after her husband, Yevgeny, was buried following his gruesome death in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region in June 2022, the People of Baikal journal reports.
“They said they couldn’t even change his clothing, they just put his clothes there [in the coffin]. They buried him on June 13, but I don’t remember that day at all,” Anufriyeva said.
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In her grief, she said she visited a local temple, where a Buddhist monk advised her exactly when to undergo the final step of the IVF procedure so that her “deceased husband will be reborn into a child.”
She did as the monk suggested and gave birth to a daughter almost a year to the day after her husband died, on June 7 2023. Now she’s planning to use the last remaining embryo to have another child, admitting that she knows she will “be alone until the end of life,” since in her town “there are no men left, they’re all at war.”
Several other widows have said they plan to use IVF to give their late husbands children, with one in the Sverdlov region saying she felt compelled to do so because he “always dreamed of a child.”
And in at least one case, a mother talked her unmarried son into donating his sperm before he headed off to the battlefield so that she’d have the chance to one day have grandchildren.
The mother, Svetlana, said she’s now trying to find a surrogate to carry her son’s child after he died in the war.
While there’s been a push to create a sperm bank for all troops involved in Vladimir Putin’s so-called “special military operation,” those plans may have been hampered by Western sanctions imposed over the war.
Artyom Zuyev, a medical lawyer, told the journal that certain equipment required—like refrigeration units using liquid nitrogen—is simply off limits with the current sanctions.
He said there also seemed to be something cynical about authorities’ enthusiasm for troops preserving their sperm: “I see in such an initiative only the need of the authorities to give the men going to the front an additional incentive. As a certain factor that reduces the fear of death. That is, the state gives you the opportunity not only to die, but also to reproduce even after death. And it’s even a little funny.”
