Some of the last members of Russia’s threatened indigenous peoples are dying on the battlefields in Ukraine.
Thousands of men being fed into Vladimir Putin’s war machine are failing to return home alive, according to human rights defenders.
Recruits from a reindeer herding community around 2,000 miles from the frontline are among those who have been conscripted or promised large payments to join the military.
One representative of the indigenous peoples warned that they are facing a ‘generational’ crisis due to the ‘dramatic’ numbers who are dying in the all-out invasion of Ukraine.
The fate of those being mobilised, who are mainly drawn from the north, Siberia and far east, was revealed this week by the testimony of a 19-year-old soldier taken prisoner by Ukraine.
The injured man, whose Nenets people traditionally herd reindeer in the remote Yamal Peninsula, surrendered after special forcestroops threw grenades into a shattered basement where he and two comrades had …