Officials to Call a Place that Sent to Ukraine Large Share of Men to Fight and Die in Ukraine 'a Village of Military Valor'

 Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 4 – Officials in Kamchatka have become the first to seek to declare one of their population points “a Village of Military Valor” because it sent 39 of the 67 working age men of Sedanka, most of whom are ethnically Koryak or Itelmen, to fight in Ukraine. At least five of those have beeb killed, and an additional one is MIA.

            The regional officials said that they would erect a monument to those who fought and died in Ukraine, a promise that has attracted attention. As a result, it seems likely that this Kamchatka initiative will be repeated elsewhere and represent yet another measure of the sacrifice non-Russians and poor rural Russians are making in Putin’s war.

            The most comprehensive reports are semnasem.org/news/2025/08/04/glava-kamchatki-poobeshal-obyavit-selom-voinskoj-doblesti-mesto-otkuda-na-vojnu-ushlo-bolshe-poloviny-muzhchin and meduza.io/feature/2025/08/04/kamchatskaya-sedanka-stanet-pervym-v-rossii-selom-voinskoy-slavy-za-zaslugi-v-svo-polovina-muzhchin-sela-ushli-na-voynu-s-ukrainoy.

            For American readers, the notion that one small town may make enormous sacrifices in a war will lead to a recollection of the Bedford Boys, the story of how so many people from that Virginia town died on D-Day and the story behind the film, Saving Private Ryan, about how US commanders dispatched a unit to prevent the losses from that town from being even greater.

            There is no evidence that the Russian command has ever worried about such things, especially when the sacrifices hit ethnic minorities rather than ethnic Russian troops. But the designation of villages as places of particular “military valor” will ensure that no one in them will ever forget how Putin’s war was fought and who paid the highest price.