Russia state TV celebrates couple who used payout from their son dying in Ukraine to buy a new car to drive to his grave

• Russian state TV highlighted a family who got a new car with money from their son's death.
• It showed the parents with a new white Lada they could afford because of his death in Ukraine.

Russian state TV ran a bizarre segment on Sunday about a bereaved couple buying a new car with a payout from the government for losing their son to the war in Ukraine.

According to independent Russian news site Meduza, the Rossia-1 segment featured the parents of Staff Sergeant Alexei Malov, who died in the early days of the invasion.

The news item, filmed in western Russia's Saratovskaya region, showed Malov's parents exiting the driveway in a white Lada on a trip to the cemetery.

Russian families receive what is known as "coffin money" when their relatives are killed, the segment explained.

BBC Monitoring reporter Francis Scarr tweeted a clip from the show with English subtitles on Monday:

"Like his grandfathers and great-grandfathers he fought against fascism," the Rossia-1 voiceover said of Malov, per Scarr's translation.

As a state-controlled outlet, Rossia-1 echoed the Kremlin's spurious claim that the invasion of Ukraine is a mission to defeat "Nazis."

His father told the outlet: "In memory of our son we bought a nice new car."

The voiceover continued by saying that Malov "dreamed about having a white car, just like this one."

It's unclear exactly how much the payout was in this instance. On March 3, President Vladimir Putin announced that 7.2 million roubles (around $134,000) would go to the families of each deceased soldier, according to Russian newspaper Vedomosti.

Most regional governments also offer compensation, varying between one and four million roubles (around $18,000-$73,000), the outlet reported.

In June, President Vladimir Putin decreed that families of National Guardsmen — the internal paramilitary force that reports directly to the Kremlin — would receive compensation of 5 million roubles ($81,500), Reuters reported.

It was the first admission that the servicemen, usually used in domestic matters, had been sent to the Ukraine war, the outlet reported.