Russian military commissars in Crimea have reportedly come up with a new scam to get rich using the bodies of dead soldiers—by extorting the grieving family members.
That’s according to the human rights group Crimea SOS, which reported Thursday that military commissars have been lying to family members of soldiers killed in Ukraine about the whereabouts of their remains. While the bodies are already stored at a morgue in Simferopol, the group says, military officials tell families they have to pay an extra fee to have the remains retrieved from the battlefield.
“They offer a fee of about 100,000-150,000 rubles for carrier services. The ‘commissars’ explain this scheme [by citing] the inconvenient location of the body and its transportation, otherwise it will be a long wait for the body,” Crimea SOS said.
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There have been at least three such instances of the scam so far, they said. Last month, the group warned of university students on the occupied peninsula being blackmailed into joining the Russian military, with staffers telling them they wouldn’t pass their exams otherwise.
Earlier this week, a Russian soldier who spoke to the New York Times revealed that officers handed down orders to not collect the bodies of soldiers killed in action—because then the government would have to pay their families compensation. Instead, troops were reportedly told to classify the dead as missing in action.
Myriad reports have also emerged during the war of families getting stiffed on promised payments, bodies being left to rot in mass graves, and corpses arriving home already “half-decomposed” because officials transported them only in “small batches” to hide the staggering death toll.
