Aktau

Two days later, as I said at the beginning, the group of servicemen was carrying out an amphibious landing from the patrol boat that was named Kaisar.

And it happened around 40-45 kilometers south of Aktau.

So the official account says that the weather condition got worse very quickly and a wave struck the unit as the men were leaving the boat.

Again, as a result, 17 of them were swept into the sea.

Just to conclude, I just did want to take a slightly wider look at this whole episode beyond the actual incident itself and all the kind of the political ramifications of it it feels to me like this really this tragedy struck a nerve partly for the reason you said because the people were so young many of them were conscripts and like these are people who are maybe a little bit against their will being enlisted into doing military service and they do it of course because they are citizens of their country and yet this happens to them.

And I don't know if you saw the footage, which I have to say, I mean, I consider myself someone who is not easily shocked by things, but this one really did shock me.

It was a footage of, there was a video footage from outside the Aktau morgue where the servicemen, a serviceman was standing behind a metal gate and calling out the names of the of the dead soldiers to their relatives.

You can hear their voices, you know, mothers and relatives crying and shrieking.

It was like a whole journey full of these, um, these connections, uh, whether it would be like, just like conversations with a kid working in a little, um, hole in the wall place, like, like selling fish or something like this in the evening or, um, um, like, well, I was able to, uh, or like, like, um, I guess my, like, the best one is, two of the best ones, I think, were the, I was on this long train in Kazakhstan through the desert, and there were not many trains, so I'd, like, I'd gotten there just in time to get on this train.

They were, like, It was in, Aktau was where the boat came in from the Caspian Sea.

And I was like, suddenly I was like, I have no idea what's going on or what to do.

And the kid who had driven me from the port to the little tiny station was like, oh, this train that you want leaves in like 20 minutes.

So the reason I was so tired, though, I'll tell you one more story for the trip.

Okay.

The reason I was so tired going into that was because I had taken a boat across the Caspian Sea from Baku in Azerbaijan to Aktau in Kazakhstan.

And this really was a...