So finally, last week Nikolai Plasetsky ended 10 months of misidentity and was laid to rest in the soil of his native Moscow.
"Of course, there are hard days to come, but now, at least, I have found my son," Anna said, weeping by her son's coffin.
According to the Defense Ministry, the mix-up occurred because the bodies of Plasetsky and Gelov looked alike -- especially after being mutilated by grenades and fire when they arrived in Rostov, where dead soldiers from Chechnya are taken.
After getting permission to open the grave in Chyornoyeozero, Anna immediately spotted the tatoos Nikolai had on both his arms.
"I could still recognize them, although he had been buried for half a year. That is how I could prove my son was in that grave," she said.
After transferring the body to Moscow, she held a tearful funeral at Nikol-Arkhangelskoe graveyard, concluding by saying: "Forgive me, Kolya, I couldn't save you.
"You didn't die for any noble principles. You died as an innocent, due to others' madness," she said, condemning the war in Chechnya.
A Defense Ministry official who declined to be identified said both Plasetsky and Gelov were killed in Grozny on Jan. 1 and their bodies were brought to Rostov.
"Soldiers Plasetsky and Gelov looked similar," the official said. "Their dead bodies were heavily burned and, tragically, it was impossible to tell the one from the other. The Army cannot do much when the relatives are not able to recognize their sons. We can only regret what happened."
Plasetsky was a paratrooper in the Russian Army's 106th Airborne Division. Enrolled in Tulsk military district, he had barely finished his basic training when he was sent to the front in Grozny in December. He was killed with hundreds of other Russian soldiers on Jan. 1 in a failed Russian attempt to take the city, according to the Defense Ministry.
Anna said she called her son regularly until Dec. 1, when he was ordered to Chechnya. She said she could not reach him after that, and her next news was a note from the Russian Military High Command in Masdor that arrived at her home in Moscow on Jan. 5, saying, "Your son is dead. With regrets."
"I never believed he was killed," she said. "No one could show me his body, and until I could see him dead with my own eyes, I had hopes of finding him alive."
She said she left her job and her adult daughters, Yulia and Zhenya, in Moscow to search for her son, spending 10 months in Chechnya, tramping battlefields throughout the war-torn republic.
"I received a lot of help from Chechen fighters, and also from other Russian mothers I met in Chechnya who were also looking for their lost sons," she added.
More than 1,200 Russian women have gone to Chechnya, searching for the remains of their soldier-sons to take them back home.
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