Ukrainians ignore missile risks to attend funerals; Kyrgyz town mourns its war dead

LVIV (REUTERS) - The clouds of black smoke hanging over Lviv's skyline had scarcely cleared overnight when mourners began gathering in the city on Sunday (March 27) to bury Ukrainian soldiers killed in the war against Russia.

Even as firefighters hosed down an oil depot struck by rockets the day before, a crowd assembled at Saints Peter and Paul Garrison Church in Ukraine's western capital, just 60km from the border with Poland.

"I knew that the churches would be very crowded today. I was so worried about today," said 70-year old retiree Liubov Odnorih.

She was one of many crammed into the ornate Ukrainian Greek Catholic church for the funeral of two soldiers killed in other parts of the country.

It was the youth of those dying in battle that struck the priest, Roman Vysochanskii, "I came and looked at the burial plots for so many of them, I saw that the children for whom I cry are younger than my own."

A few thousand kilometres away in a provincial town in Kyrgyzstan, the mother of a man who died fighting for Russia in Ukraine wailed as his coffin was carried away by blue-uniformed Russian military men, on its final journey into the ground.

"Cursed Ukraine!" she cried, gently stroking the green, embroidered fabric with Islamic inscriptions draped over the coffin. "You always wanted to join the Russian army and this is what happened. Where are you going, away from me? Take me with you!" she called to the coffin as the procession from her home began.

Rustam Zarifulin's funeral in Kara-Balta, around an hour's drive from Kyrgyzstan's capital Bishkek, was the second of its kind this week in the mainly Muslim Central Asian country, as the echoes of Russia's war in Ukraine reverberate in some of the farthest-flung corners of the former Soviet Union.

Amid tight restrictions on reporting the conflict, Russian authorities on Friday gave only their second official military death toll since the start of the invasion, at 1,351. This is far below Western estimates, with one senior Nato official saying between 7,000 and 15,000 Russian soldiers have died in the war that is now over a month old.

Zarifulin, who was 26, was born in Kyrgyzstan, but joined the Russian army after he left school. He died in Ukraine on March 14.

Kara-Balta officials joined staff from Moscow's embassy at the career serviceman's funeral, as cows ambled through the town's backstreets and an Islamic cleric oversaw prayers around the casket.

A Russian embassy attache said the dead soldier had been awarded a medal for bravery. Local officials in the pro-Moscow country were heard asking residents attending the funeral not to talk to journalists, as canine barks and human crying punctuated the quiet.

Two days earlier, another Kyrgyzstan-born man who died fighting for Russia in Ukraine, Egemberdi Dorboyev, was buried in his native Issyk-Kul region. According to media in the impoverished country of seven million people, 19-year-old Dorboyev was conscripted into the army last autumn.

Growing evidence of conscripts fighting and dying in Ukraine has proved thorny for Russia's government. President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said earlier this month that Mr Putin had told Russian army commanders to "categorically exclude" conscripts from the conflict and would "punish" officials who had sent them there.

Kara-Balta residents who spoke to AFP testified to Zarifulin's longstanding dream to fight in Russia's army. "He said he wanted to defend Russia," said Ms Nadezhda Ladozhinskaya, a 61-year-old woman who described herself as the head of an organisation of Russian compatriots.

"Kara-Balta has lost one of its best guys."

A 52-year-old man called Mr Timofei Karpenko said that his family used to joke about his daughter marrying Zarifulin, whom he knew from a young age. "When you were standing close to him, he would make you want to straighten out your back. A real man. A real warrior," said Mr Karpenko, through tears.

"I don't know who is guilty," Mr Karpenko said of the war that the United Nations estimates has sent 3.8 million people to seek refuge in other countries.

"Some say Putin started it, others say..." he said, trailing off without finishing his sentence. "But God sees everything and he will make his judgment."

Rather than Mr Karpenko's daughter, the role of bereaved fiancee fell on a young, mousy-haired girl with brown eyes, who stood at the shoulder of Mr Zarifulin's distraught mother throughout.

"You were waiting for a wedding," the older woman told her. "But you ended up at his graveside."