At a ceremony in the Kremlin’s St George Hall on March 17, President Putin chose to honour service personnel and defence industry specialists for their feats in Syria; and not to honour …

700 service personnel were in attendance, but five others were absent, having been killed in Syria; the Kremlin chose to disremember one of these deaths entirely, while the demise of Captain Fyodor Zhuravlyov was officially acknowledged only at the last minute.

Putin waxed lyrical: “Here in this hall are Yelena Yurieva Peshkova, Valentina Mikhailovna Cheremisina, Irina Vladimirovna Pozynich and Yulia Igorevna Zhuravlyova, the widows of those of our comrades who lost their lives in the fight against the terrorists. I understand that the deaths of Oleg, Ivan, Alexander and Fyodor represent an irreplaceable loss for their families, relatives, friends, and comrades-in-arms. Their passing has been felt as a personal grief by all of us, which is why I have called your husbands, fathers and sons by name. And not in the capacity of Supreme Commander or President, but in that of a grateful and grieving Russian citizen. Our comrades remained faithful to their oaths and respected their military duties until the very last. We will remember their courage and nobility; we will remember them as real men and as brave soldiers.”

It would appear that the regime decided to disregard the fifth Russian fatality in Syria, and the name of Vadim Kostenko therefore received no mention. The Russian Ministry of Defence has ruled him a suicide, but relatives and friends refuse to accept this official version: “His nose was bashed in, blue, broken,” a close relative of Kostenko’s told reporters. “The left side of his face near his temple was bashed in and indented. His [left] ear was all blue. This had all been immediately covered with powder – powder was even poured into his eyes. His jaw wasn’t just dislodged but dislocated to the left. When they were putting him [into the coffin], his head made crunching sounds and his neck vertebrae were all broken.” And yet, an official Ministry of Defence representative responded to a State Duma deputy’s enquiry by alleging that the forensic investigation had found no evidence to suggest that Kostenko had died violently.

The suicide theory is contradicted by a further piece of evidence obtained by Novaya Gazeta. “Neighbours in contact with the father of the deceased, said off the record that on the day of his death, Kostenko was sent to guard some searchlights; later, he reported on the phone that he’d been attacked.”

Perhaps the degree of obfuscation surrounding the death of Vadim Kostenko may be explained by the fact he was the first Russian serviceman to meet his end in Syria. The Russian regime learnt from its Ukrainian adventure that it is perfectly practicable to disseminate total lies about service deaths, and bury military personnel in secret; the first fatality of the new war may therefore have prompted what had by now become a reflex response.

The first fatality of the new war may have prompted a reflex response

Were it not for the efforts of the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT), a group of Russian investigative bloggers, the death of Vadim Kostenko – and his funeral in a far-flung Russian province – may well have passed under the radar. Not only did the CIT activists establish a plethora of facts about Kostenko’s death, but they also generously provided professional journalists with new leads for possible future investigations: “A friend of the deceased wrote to CIT activists saying that Kostenko’s body had been brought back from Syria in a zinc coffin, while the command of the military unit informed the villagers of the deaths of nine more Russians.”

Conflict Intelligence Team investigators were also the first to release information, back in November 2015, about the death in Syria of 27-year-old captain Fyodor Zhuravlyov. According to the intelligence collected by the activists, Fyodor Zhuravlyov had served “in one of the most secret and elite units of Russia’s Ministry of Defence.” As journalists were to discover later, Zhuravlyov “performed assignments involving the guidance of the strategic air force’s high-precision weapons”.

Whatever the facts may be, Captain Zhuravlyov’s funeral followed the usual script

Whatever the facts may be, Captain Zhuravlyov’s funeral followed the usual script: no publicity plus a wreath from the Ministry of Defence. Furthermore, his relatives were also persuaded to side with the official version of events: “At the funeral, the commander of Zhuravlyov’s unit reported that he had been killed during an operation in Kabardino-Balkaria, in which armed forces eliminated 14 militants. However, this anti-terrorist operation was officially reported on Sunday, November 22 – several days after the date of the serviceman’s death. Furthermore, there was no mention of any casualties in the report.  […] Zhuravlyov’s elder brother, for his part, reiterated that he had been killed in an operation which took place on Russian soil.”

Over the course of their investigation into the circumstances of Zhuravlyov’s death, CIT activists unearthed information on military casualties that remained unrecorded in any official statistics: “On November 23, Fyodor’s military unit paid its last respects to him and another fallen comrade. According to their sources, the service took place in Solnechnogorsk, on the shore of Lake Senezh” (where there is an elite troops garrison).

On the day following the medals ceremony in the Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov was asked whether Russian forces in Syria had suffered any losses which remained unreported. Journalists noted that Peskov refused to discuss classified combat casualties in Syria.

Whatever the true cause of Vadim Kostenko’s demise – dedovshchina (sadistic hazing), a Syrian attack, an accident, or even an unlikely-seeming suicide – his death called for an objective and transparent investigation. In the absence of such an investigation, the “forgetfulness” of the president, who failed to mention Kostenko among the Russian victims of the war in Syria, is indicative of the low value put on human life in today’s Russia.

Likewise, the case of Fyodor Zhuravlyov demonstrates that the Russian president can freely determine the fates of Russia’s citizens not only while they are still alive, but posthumously as well; it took almost four months for the regime to officially recognise Zhuravlyov as a hero – and this only by dint of the president’s speech.

Every country needs its heroes; they support the apparatus of state, shape how the people think of themselves. But we will never know if Vadim Kostenko died a hero, or Fyodor Zhuravlyov; and that tells us all that what we need to know about this heroic regime.