{"id":23088,"date":"2026-10-03T08:56:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-03T08:56:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/2026\/10\/03\/russia-unveils-memorial-soviet-soldiers-killed-afghanistan\/"},"modified":"2026-10-03T08:56:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-03T08:56:14","slug":"russia-unveils-memorial-soviet-soldiers-killed-afghanistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/2026\/10\/03\/russia-unveils-memorial-soviet-soldiers-killed-afghanistan\/","title":{"rendered":"Russia unveils memorial to 15,000 Soviet soldiers killed in Afghanistan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A memorial titled &#8220;Afghanistan in the Passage of Time and Memory&#8221; has been unveiled in Russia&#8217;s Smolensk region, with the names of 15,022 former Soviet soldiers killed in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1988 engraved on the memorial&#8217;s stone slabs.<\/p>\n<p>The memorial is being unveiled as the former Soviet military invasion plunged Afghanistan into one of the deadliest periods in modern history. According to official United Nations estimates, about 1.5 million Afghans were killed during the war, while large parts of the country&#8217;s infrastructure, including roads, schools and agricultural networks, were destroyed.<\/p>\n<p>By the time Soviet forces withdrew in 1988, more than 6.2 million Afghans had left their homes and sought refuge in neighbouring countries, including Iran and Pakistan. This mass displacement continued to shape the social and economic consequences of that period for years after the war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Russia has unveiled a memorial in Smolensk for Soviet troops killed in Afghanistan, where 15,022 names are engraved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23087,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-important-news","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23088\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}