Andrei Nikiforov, a lawyer from St Petersburg, was one of the hundreds of thousands of Russians mobilised since last month to hold the frontlines in his country’s faltering war in Ukraine. On 25 September he received his call-up papers. By 7 October, just two weeks later, he was dead. “We don’t know what happened,” said Alexander Zelensky, the head of the Nevsky Collegium of Lawyers, of which Nikiforov was a member. Zelensky and a member of Nikiforov’s family confirmed his call-up and death. “All we have is a date and a place.” That place was Lysychansk, one of the most...