Bender War Cemetery

 Andreas finished another set of photos from last summer.  These are from Bender, where we took his parents while they were here in Moldova.  This was the first time I'd visited it in the summer, and it's a beautiful, bleak, sad place even then.  The cemetery is very close to downtown on a busy street and is surrounded by commercial buildings and apartment blocks.

The people buried here fought for or against Russian control of the area that is Moldova.  Most of them died during the reign of Catherine the Great in the various battles for Tighina Fortress.  The last one buried here died in 1992 during the hot period of the Transnistrian War.  Because of that war, there are still 20,000 Russian troops on Moldovan soil to "protect" the breakaway "country" of Transnistria.  It's a sad situation that is only made worse by the current crisis in Ukraine.