They are poignant photos, like images of a funeral that often are. Seven fresh graves in the dark brown ground, grieving relatives caressing the coffins with their fingers one last time before they descend 6 feet deep. A box with only two handles, there must be a dead baby with butterfly weight in it. Priests performing their eternal, incensed rituals. Then the men with shovels, who inexorably slam the graves, place the Orthodox memorials on them, and cover them with an abundance of floral wreaths and blood-red rose hearts. After the ceremonies: the desolation of the graves. The photo above.
Thursday’s funeral of seven family members who died in the plane crash in the Russian port city of Yeysk (on the Sea of Azov), as well as that accident itself, is one of the rare hard news topics in Russia that received attention in the photo offer of the international news agencies in the past week. (130 times). Other news – photos of the chaotic mobilization for the ‘special operation’ in Ukraine or funerals of the numerous soldiers who died there – did not reach the outside world, if at all, as usual.
Jejsk is the exception to the rule. At least 14 people were killed on Monday, when a Su-34 fighter plane crashed into an apartment building in the city shortly after takeoff for a training flight and exploded. Dozens of people were injured, the dead included seven from one family. The two occupants survived the crash thanks to their ejection seats. It was an event that the Russian censors apparently could not or would not erase.
Or is there something else involved in this relative openness? Could it be that Russia wants to show that not only the ‘liberation operation’ in Ukraine is euphemistically put down, but that its own inhabitants of the motherland are also being hit hard in the battle for which the Su-34 was preparing? Is it conceivable that those in power, confronted with the human tragedy in Yejsk, would use it to arouse compassion beyond borders? The deaths of alleged innocents – often promoted to ‘heroes’ by regimes – have been used so many times in world history for propaganda.
Because of the suspicion thus fueled, the disaster in Yejsk did not immediately evoke in me, and not only compassion, at first. Wasn’t it a bit exaggerated, all the international attention for this accident? Don’t we see photos and videos of bomb-destroyed apartment buildings in Ukraine every day? Photos that strike a striking visual rhyme with those from Jejsk – horror images that overlap? Burnt-out apartments, a scorched facade, holes like fallen teeth in an otherwise reasonably intact set of teeth. Debris on the ground, firefighters extinguishing what can no longer be saved. It has become an almost daily routine since the doom date of February 24, at least for the sheltered Western European follower of the news.
There are numerous similarities between the horror in Yejsk and that in Ukraine. But there is also an important difference: the deaths in Russia are the result of a fateful accident, which were deliberately targeted in Ukraine. Isn’t such an accident, especially with the same Su-34 that the Russians used for bombing raids in Ukraine, a case of bad luck? Sad, yet less sad than all those countless victims who were deliberately killed less than 100 kilometers north of Yeysk, in Mariupol?
To ask the question is to answer it. No, both categories are equally bad, of course. Or: stupid, unethical question, because all suffering is incomparable and – if that would make sense – unquantifiable. Dead is dead. So it is hard to say otherwise than that I was briefly swept along by the enemy thinking that war can awaken in you. Just for a moment, and yet cause for shame on the jaws.