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Mrs. Tumanova spoke to a major in Chechnya by telephone who confirmed the young man had perished in Ukraine, but refused to explain why he was sent there or give any details. The order to go there, “came from above in verbal form only”, he said.

Mr. Tumanov had served as a conscript soldier after school and he decided to return to the forces as a career soldier when he couldn’t find a job. In June he was sent to Chechnya. “I tried to persuade him not to go because of what was happening in Ukraine,” said Mrs. Tumanova. “But our president said that none of our soldiers would be sent there – ’it’s just Ukrainians fighting each other’ – and I believed that. So in the end I did not argue.”

Mr. Tumanov had not been in Chechnya 10 days before he and other soldiers at the base were approached and asked if they would go to Donbas to fight as volunteers.

He and his friends refused, he told his mother by telephone. “Who wants to die?” she said. “That was their thinking. Nobody was attacking Russia; if they had been, Anton would have been first in the queue.”

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By the middle of July, things had changed. Now 27777, his regular army unit, was dispatched to a temporary camp in the Rostov region, near the border with Ukraine, officially “for exercises.”

Soon he was telling Nastya Chernova, his fiancee, that he was going on short trips into Ukraine to accompany deliveries of arms and military vehicles to the rebels.

This was the moment when pro-Moscow militia in eastern Ukraine were on the brink of caving in to government forces, who had almost surrounded the separatist capital, Donetsk. Over the next month, Russia would stage a major intervention, sending tanks and troops across the border to help reclaim rebel territory.