Cold-calling Siberia

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 1 December 2022

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sasha Koltun volunteered to fight in Putin's war against Ukraine, though his mother Yelena begged him not to go. Four days later, he was dead, one of several dozen new recruits from across Russia who never even reached the battlefield. What happened to him - and will his mother, battling official indifference and obstruction, ever discover the truth? With the Kremlin currently restricting access to Russia for Western reporters, Tim Whewell picks up the phone to talk to her and other people in and around the city of Bratsk, in central Siberia, about how the war has affected them. Many are afraid to talk. But others describe their anxiety as they wave goodbye to their menfolk, their confused feelings about the war - a mixture of patriotism and doubt - and the chaotic organisation of the call up. Some recruits have had to buy their own uniform and equipment. Others have suffered as discipline breaks down at some training camps. Tim talks to a former policewoman determined to encourage support for the war, who makes stretchers for wounded Russian soldiers - and to a young woman who believes it was her boyfriend's duty to be a soldier. But Yelena Koltun - who lost her son Sasha - cannot understand what her country is fighting for. Presented and produced by Tim Whewell

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Angara, wind whipped and ice bound in winter, is one of the great rivers of Siberia,
0:10.1	flowing nearly 2,000 kilometres through dense forests of pine and spruce to its waters
0:15.8	which can even greater river the Inesie and eventually the Arctic Ocean.
0:22.3	In the wilderness north of the city of Baratsk, it widens to two miles across, and there
0:28.1	a few winters ago, a jaunt young man called Sasha Kaltun took his mother Yelena fishing.
0:34.2	He pulled me across the ice on a sledge.
0:40.2	Then we drilled these holes in the ice with one of those spiral drills.
0:48.6	You twist it down, pull it up, and then I put my rod over and up comes the fish.
1:00.7	I must have caught 30-35 perch there were.
1:08.1	Bundled up against the wind, a hot flask of tea to keep warm, the snow glistening.
1:14.6	It was the kind of day that can make living in Siberia such a joy, but now it just reminds
1:20.8	Yelena of all the best things about the sun she's lost.
1:26.6	I always had fishing rods, that's the kind of guy he was.
1:32.8	Grounded.
1:33.8	That's the blood.
1:35.8	Hunter, the fisherman, the forest was always calling him.
1:41.6	I'm scared of the forest.
1:45.3	They're best there, but he was fearless.
1:51.6	I must have been if he went off to the war.
1:58.8	On September 21st, Vladimir Putin facing ever
2:11.2	a great emigratory setbacks in Ukraine ordered what he called a partial mobilisation of
2:17.1	Russia's reservists.
	...

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