A Colombian Woman Came to Russia Looking for Her Missing Brother - She Found a Cemetery Full of Colombians

A Colombian woman travelled to Russia searching for her brother, missing since he went to fight in Russia's army. She was taken to a cemetery on the outskirts of a Russian town and shown row after row of crooked, hand-poured concrete grave markers - almost all of them bearing Colombian names. The video was published on X by "I Want to Live" project:

29,000 Contracts, At Least 3,390 Dead

The project says that from the personal data it holds alone, it has records on nearly 29,000 foreigners who signed contracts with Russia's armed forces - and that at least 3,390 of them have already died. When one of them dies, the Russian state does nothing to help get the body home. If a dead man was carrying a tag or documents identifying him, he gets a marked grave. If his remains can't be identified, nobody goes looking for relatives in Colombia, or Uganda, or anywhere else - the remains are cremated or buried unnamed.

What She Was Charged

According to the video, the woman came looking for her brither - identified only as Lucía - was charged 176,220 rubles, roughly $6,700, in the process. Neither the video nor the project's post specifies exactly what the payment was for. It fits a pattern already documented on this site: brokers in Kenya charge grieving families for basic information about relatives who died fighting for Russia, and commissions on any compensation they're eventually paid.

See also: Russian brokers monetizing Kenyan families' compensation claims

The Names on the Graves

The names below are transcribed from the gravestones shown in the video and in photos of the site. They are Cyrillic transliterations engraved on the markers themselves, not the men's original Spanish-language documents - spelling below is a best-effort reconstruction, and a handful of entries were too worn, cropped, or poorly lit to read with confidence. Those are marked.

If Your Relative Is in Russia

If you believe a relative went to Russia and you've lost contact with them, you are not alone, and there is a path other families have used to search for answers.

What to do if you lost contact with a relative in Russia

If your relative is still serving there is a way to save his life with the "I Want to Live" project. Read more details here.