When Yulia Seleznyova walks around her hometown in Russia, she scrutinizes everyone who passes by in hopes of locking eyes with her son Aleksei.
He was last heard from on New Year’s Eve 2022, when he sent holiday wishes from the school in eastern Ukraine that his unit of newly mobilized soldiers used as headquarters.
The Ukrainian military hit the school with US-supplied HIMARS rockets on New Year’s Day. Russian authorities acknowledged dozens of deaths, although pro-Russian military bloggers and Ukrainian authorities put the actual number in the hundreds.
Alexei was not identified in the official death toll because not a single part of his body was found in the rubble after the strike. Ms. Seleznyova was left with nothing to bury, and, she says, no closure. But it has also left a small trace of hope for a miracle.
“I still go around the city sometimes, with my eyes wide open, thinking that he might be sitting somewhere, but he doesn’t remember us, but maybe we are there in his subconscious,” Ms. Seleznyova said in an interview late last year. in her one-room apartment in Tolyatti, an industrial city on the Volga River that is home to Russia’s largest car manufacturer.
“Sometimes I think maybe he lost his memory and even got married somewhere in Ukraine, but he doesn’t remember us,” she said. “That he’s just shocked.”
Ms Seleznyova, 45, spent most of 2023 searching for answers. She traveled for days by train to the western city of Rostov, searching the morgue there for any fragments of her son’s body and waiting for the DNA she gave to authorities in January 2023 to find his match.
“January, February, March — I was in a fog for three months,” he said. “I was so depressed. You don’t need anything, you don’t want anything. Life just stopped.”
Almost 14 months after his death, she still mourns her son, whom she calls by his nickname, Liosa. He works four days a week in a factory doing a job that requires a lot of physical strength. It distracts her.
But during the three days he is off, he said: “Sometimes I just cry. Sadness washes over me. And I’m still thinking to myself that maybe it’s not true.”
Alexei was 28 when he was killed, leaving behind a wife and an infant. He was mobilized in the first days after President Vladimir V. Putin announced a “partial mobilization” in September 2022, his mother and sister Olesya said.
He was taken from the factory where he worked straight to the troop office, he said, and then to a training facility, where his family got him the clothes and supplies he would need for his deployment.
He was a star soccer player on a local team and planted trees for community service. He had completed his mandatory military service but “never had an automatic rifle in his hand,” his mother said. Although he had no medical training, he was assigned to a unit responsible for extracting wounded soldiers from the battlefield and providing them with emergency care, he said.
When he was mobilized, Alexei’s wife was pregnant with their first child. When their son Artyom was born in December, Alexei took three days off to see him before moving to Makiivka, in Ukraine’s Russian-held Donetsk region.
A war that until that point had not particularly concerned Ms. Selezniova and her family had suddenly entered their lives.
“I couldn’t even imagine that something like this would happen and, moreover, that it would affect our family,” Olesya, 21, said. “Actually, it didn’t even cross my mind.”
Her mother, who said she had not paid much attention to politics before the war, agreed.
“I never thought in my life that I would bury my children,” she said. “We didn’t think it could happen to us until it did.”
Mother and daughter said they see the same willful ignorance in others now, “as if nothing is happening.”
“This has already become normal for people,” Ms Seleznyova said of war and loss. “I go to the city and observe people: They are having fun, going out, relaxing, living a normal life. no one thinks about what’s going on there.”
Both mother and daughter shared accounts of soldiers returning to Tolyatti with serious injuries only to be sent back to the front without enough time to recover.
He prays for the war to end. Her willingness to speak openly about the fighting is unusual in modern Russia, where a climate of stifling repression has criminalized protesting the war or criticizing it in public. Hundreds of political prisoners are serving sentences for “discrediting the Russian armed forces” or spreading “false information” about the military.
The cemetery on the outskirts of Tolyatti has rows and rows of graves of fallen soldiers. There are at least a handful whose death dates are on the same New Year’s Day.
“I met a friend recently,” Ms. Seleznyova said. “He works in the cemetery making tombstones, building fences. And I met him the other day, he told me his condolences. And he told us, there are two to three people every day.”
Russian authorities have not released official statistics on war dead as of September 2022. But the Pentagon estimates that about 60,000 Russian soldiers have been killed and that about 240,000 have been wounded.
Alexey does not yet have a grave. Mrs Seleznyova spent nearly 11 months trying to come to terms with her son’s death. After months of joining forces with two other mothers searching for fragments of their sons’ bodies without success, she had to go to court to force the state to declare her son dead, calling witnesses who put him at school in Makiivka at the time of the strike.
Almost 14 months since his death, he has yet to have a funeral. In a text message on Friday, Ms Seleznyova said she had not yet received the official document certifying his military service, meaning she and Alexei’s widow are not yet entitled to the lump sum payments the state gives to the families of fallen soldiers .
Payments can be as high as the equivalent of $84,000 in some areas, more than nine times Russia’s average annual salary.
“There are, of course, those who care about the money,” he said, noting that one reason there isn’t more public criticism of the war is because “they silenced women with these payments.”
“Everyone’s values are different,” he continued. “And our authorities understand that people will go because everything we have is in loans, mortgages and debts, which are not insignificant.”
Ms Seleznyova said the prospect of money did nothing to ease her pain. And attempts to convince her that her son’s death was not in vain do not comfort her.
“Some people tell me, Julia, keep it together. Life goes on. You have children, grandchildren. And your son is a hero,” he said. “I’m not interested in him being a hero. I need him sitting here on my sofa, eating my borsch and pelmeni (pasta) and kissing and hugging me like he used to.”
She still sometimes allows herself to dream about it.
“There’s a knock on the door and I’m going to open it, he’s going to be standing in front of me,” she said. “Who cares in what situation. Let it be without arms, without legs, it doesn’t matter. I need him to sit here.”
