“Their conscription, like that of the Yakuts and Dagestanis, has been disproportionate in comparison to other peoples,” says the president of the Free Buryatia Foundation, Alexandra Garmayapova, in a telephone interview.Ethnic Buryats played a prominent role in the Donbas insurgency in 2014 and 2015, when the Kremlin sent troops to Ukraine in secret to consolidate what it wanted to portray as a pro-Russian separatist movement in the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.“In 2014, Buryatia was one of the regions that suffered the greatest number of losses,” says Garmayapova, who believes that a lack of opportunity at home has historically been one of the main reasons for their mass conscription.The burnt face of a Buryat tankman, called Doryi Batomunkuyev, published in the Russian newspaper Nóvaya Gazeta, became one of the enduring images of that conflict.They can emigrate to the north of Russia and find temporary jobs in mining, or try their luck in Moscow or Saint Petersburg, where they are faced with racism.” The Free Buryatia Foundation asked its subscribers to recount their experiences of racism: “In just a couple of weeks we received more than 2,000 stories of this kind and I ended up losing count after 4,000."