Russian Officials Play 'Hunger Games' Music as They Honor Fallen Soldier

Russian authorities have unveiled a monument to a soldier killed in Ukraine to the soundtrack of the dystopian "Hunger Games" films, footage posted to social media shows.

The statue, which appears in a clip posted to Telegram by Russian independent outlet Novaya Gazeta, was created in memory of a 21-year-old soldier from the Buryatia republic in eastern Siberia, the outlet wrote in a post alongside the video.

The soldier was named by the outlet as Dmitry Farshinyov, who was killed in Ukraine on April 5, 2022, according to a local Telegram channel for Buryatia. In May 2022, Alexey Tsydenov, the head of the Buryatia republic, said Farshinyov had been posthumously awarded the title of "Hero of Russia" after serving in the 11th Guards Airborne Assault Brigade, citing the same date of death for the soldier.

Despite being "wounded several times, he did not give up—covering his colleagues, saving the unit, he went to the end, repelling enemy attacks," Tsydenov wrote on Telegram on May 21, 2022.

Newsweek could not independently verify this. Russia's defense ministry has been contacted for comment via email.

In the clip, the ceremony takes place to the sound of "Horn of Plenty," a piece composed by James Newton Howard and used in the "Hunger Games" films. These feature a fictional totalitarian state called Panem created by American writer Suzanne Collins.

Tsydenov said in spring 2022 that a square would be named after Farshinyov, which the Novaya Gazeta report said was the site of the new monument revealed on Tuesday.

It is thought that troops from Buryatia have sustained disproportionately high casualty rates throughout the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine.

In mid-March, the British defense ministry said that in many of Russia's eastern regions, "deaths are likely running, as a percentage of population, at a rate 30+ times higher than in Moscow."

"In places, ethnic minorities take the biggest hit," the government department wrote on Twitter.

Russia's republics include numerous ethnic groups and Buryatia is home to the Buryat people, who have historic ties to Mongolia.

Shortly after Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu announced a "partial mobilization" of Russian reservists for the Ukraine war in September 2022, the head of the advocacy group the Free Buryatia Foundation told Reuters that "there's nothing partial about the mobilization in Buryatia."

"They are taking everyone," Alexandra Garmazhapova told the outlet in September.

Victoria Maladaeva, the vice-president of the organization, told Al Jazeera in October that "statistically Dagestan, Tuva Republic and Buryat Republic, where minorities live, have the highest death toll."

"The chances of a Buryat dying in the war in Ukraine is 7.8 times higher than [an ethnic] Russian," she added.

Buryat fighters in Ukraine returned to the spotlight after Pope Francis told Jesuit magazine, America, that soldiers from the region were among "the cruelest."

"The cruelest are perhaps those who are of Russia but are not of the Russian tradition, such as the Chechens, the Buryats and so on," Pope Francis said in November 2022.

Maria Zakharova, a spokesperson for Russia's foreign ministry, hit back at the comments, saying: "We are one family with Buryats, Chechens and other representatives of our multinational and multi-confessional country."