In graves at Murmansk, Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok, in Russia, lie the bodies of 663 British military personnel. Most of the dead lost their lives in the period just after the first world war, when allied troops were sent to support rightwing White forces in the Russian civil war against the Bolsheviks, while 41 are casualties from the second world war Arctic convoys.
Their resting places have been tended over decades by the Russian military and by private contractors, paid by the UK’s Commonwealth War Graves Commission. But after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, economic sanctions meant Britain could no longer pay for the graves to be maintained.
The two countries appear to have come to a private understanding, however. The commission has continued to maintain 674 Soviet graves in its cemeteries in the UK and around the world and, although it cannot be certain, it believes that the Russians are doing the same for the 663 British military personnel.
“We haven’t seen the graves but we think they are still being maintained,” said Gareth Hardware, the commission’s area director for the UK and northern countries. “We are maintaining their graves in our cemeteries.”
Officials at the commission, which is funded by Britain and other Commonwealth nations, think the majority of the graves are tended by the Russian navy, while a private contractor has continued to oversee plots in Arkhangelsk. “Although we are currently unable to pay him, we have written confirming we will when able to do so,” a spokesperson said.
Last summer, an amateur Russian historian took photographs of the graves in Arkhangelsk and they appeared to be in good condition. “The cemetery looks very well maintained. Someone is taking care of it, even in these difficult times,” he wrote in a blog post.
A British diplomat from the embassy in Moscow also went to Murmansk on Remembrance Day last year with a Russian counterpart and reported back that the cemetery there was in good condition.
At a commission conference at the Royal United Services Institute in London last week, the Russians’ apparent respect for the British dead was welcomed. V Adm Peter Hudson, vice-chair of the commission, said: “It transcends even those very fraught national relationships which exist between our two countries today.”
Relations between London and Moscow have become so strained that earlier this month Britain was labelled Russia’s public enemy number one after the country’s foreign intelligence service accused the UK of trying to derail Donald Trump’s attempts at a peace deal.
John Foreman, who served as Britain’s defence attaché in Moscow from 2019 to 2022 and visited all but one of the eight Commonwealth war cemeteries or memorials in the country, said it was a sign of how bad relations were between the two nations that there was no treaty governing the upkeep of graves. “This is all a very difficult issue with Russia, as we don’t have the treaties in place for all casualties of the 20th century,” he said. “I argued for a formal agreement while I was there.”
It is even more difficult in the Russian-occupied Crimea region of Ukraine, where mass burial grounds housing the remains of British soldiers from the Crimean war had already been built on or desecrated. “We’ve had no sight of those,” Foreman said, adding that British diplomats from Moscow and Kyiv had been prevented from getting there during the war.
Dirk Backen, general secretary of the German war graves commission, the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge eV, still works with the Russians despite his country’s strained relationship with Moscow. “It’s the only thing still working,” he said. His commission oversees 600,000 German graves in Russia and other former areas of the eastern front. About 760,000 Soviet citizens were buried in Germany as a result of the second world war.
“We still recover Red Army soldiers in Germany each year and will provide them a proper grave in Germany,” he said. “And the Russian ambassador is invited, but is not allowed to give a speech in front of the TV camera because he will misuse this [to repeat] a narrative which explains why everything in Ukraine is justified.”
The commission’s cemeteries around the world have immaculate green lawns designed to be a reminder of English gardens. As well as international relations, climate change is a challenge and the commission said cemeteries will be redesigned over time to be more sustainable, with local plants and, in many locations, a less manicured look.
