The in-vitro conceived children of those killed in the war in Ukraine

Ever since the first mobilisation for the war, the Association of Russian Doctors and Gynaecologists had reported that the demand for the procedure of preserving one's own genetic material had greatly increased. Proekt Veter has collected the stories of the wives of soldiers killed at the front who nonetheless became pregnant with IVF after their death.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - Despite incessant appeals by the Russian authorities to fight against the decline in the birth rate and generate new children, the population appears rather insensitive and the rates are not rising as they should.

There is, however, one category that does not want to give up children, in the drama of the war in Ukraine: they are the wives of Russian soldiers sent to the front and who lost their lives, leaving behind their frozen sperm. Journalist Irina Kravtsova of Proekt Veter collected their testimonies, in the discovery of the mission of mothers who can give meaning even to destroyed lives.

Already in 2022, after the first mobilisation call for war, the association of doctors and gynaecologists reported that the demand for the procedure of preserving one's own genetic material had increased greatly.

Particularly in Yekaterinburg in the Urals, where the Clinical Institute of Reproductive Medicine is active, it was offered to men leaving for war to freeze their sperm and entrust them for safekeeping, and there was a huge turnout for this offer. Now the possibility of this operation regularly resonates in all regions of Russia, supported by central and regional authorities to ‘minimise demographic losses’.

An economist from the State University of Buryatia, Nikolaj Atanov, says that this is the best measure to support the birth rate, and that the state should assume all expenses ‘from the seminal collection to the coming of age of the children of the fallen’, indeed that the offspring of ‘war heroes’ should have access to specialised educational institutions for their effective integration into the world of work. It is difficult to calculate how many men left for the front who left the frozen bio-material, and how many women became pregnant as a result of this possibility, although some cases have been publicly reported, and Kravtsova has collected their stories.

31-year-old Lieutenant Evgenij Anufriev returned from Ukraine in his coffin on his birthday, 11 June 2022, to the small town of Kjakhta in Buryatia where he had lived with his family. According to local custom, the body was supposed to stay one night at home, before burial, but Evgenij's fellow soldiers did not hand the coffin over to his wife, because the body had deteriorated badly, lying in mud and worms for a long time, in addition to mortal wounds.

His widow Olga had had a daughter, Sofia, with him in 2018 through artificial insemination, after many unsuccessful attempts, and there were two good quality embryos left, which remained frozen in the clinic.

For this, the couple paid a sum of three thousand roubles a month (around 30 euro), and in 2021 they put themselves on the list to have another child, and Olga then immediately performed the operation as soon as she received the news of Evgenij's death, also on the advice of a Buddhist lama who had assured her that ‘your husband will be reborn as a child’. On 7 June 2023, the anniversary of her father's death, little Evgenija was born and her mother Olga declared that ‘if I had not given birth to this child, I would not have survived the pain’.

Kravtsova recounts many other similar stories, such as that of 27-year-old history student Anna and 29-year-old mechanic Dmitry Serikov from the Siberian city of Surgut, who were married during the summer of 2021. The call to arms came in September 2023, and in February 2024, Dmitry was wounded, managing to get a permit to go home for a couple of weeks by giving the commanding officer a hefty bribe, just when free semen freezing began to be systematically proposed. Anna says that with her husband they had not yet decided to have children, but accepted the proposal ‘just in case’.

Back at the front, in July Dmitry was blown up by a mine explosion, and talking to her mother Elena, Anna decided that ‘we must have a child’, despite the advice of her friends who advised her to wait for her next husband, given her still young age. While pregnant, she actually started a new relationship with a man rejected for military service, and together they welcomed the new baby Dmitry. In the maelstrom of war and the loss of the future, even in Russia there can be life reborn.