Inside Russia’s secret pandemic: How Dagestan ignored ‘hundreds’ of coronavirus deaths

Ibragim Yevtemirov saw the corpses with his own eyes. At the start, they died in twos and threes. Then there were five or six a day. At the peak, 13 bodies passed through the hospital daily.

The surgeon says doctors could see catastrophe closing in on them like a “violent and thunderous wall”. But locals in Khasavyurt, Dagestan’​s main market town near the border with Chechnya, wrote the virus off as a Masonic conspiracy. They didn’t trust the federal government – there was history here – and by extension the doctors. They continued to meet, to embrace each other, and, invariably, to wind up in hospital.

With the first deaths, came the mass funerals. Hundreds more would fall ill. It was “like watching climbers falling from mountains, dragging one another down, one by one,” says Yevtemirov. Soon, Khasavyurt was sealed off by the police, with helicopters piercing the cordon to evacuate the worst cases daily. “We hadn’t seen helicopters since the Chechen wars... and it felt like a war, with the hospital in the middle of a protracted siege and bodies falling around us.”