The Kremlin can hide the death toll. It can’t hide the graves.
As the war in Ukraine drags on, Moscow is taking great pains to suppress casualty figures by closing databases and prosecuting those who document the dead.
In September, a Russian court sentenced a middle-aged man to 14 years in a penal colony for photographing the graves of Russian soldiers who died in Ukraine. The Kremlin is reluctant to disclose the true death toll of the war, as independent journalists and activists have used photography to reveal the true losses, which far exceed the numbers the Kremlin has officially acknowledged.
Russian authorities have warned that photographing military graves could result in life imprisonment, and the Federal Security Service has conducted patrols at cemeteries to find offenders. Dozens of people have been arrested in recent months, with charges of treason for cooperation with Ukrainian intelligence services. Russia's casualty-tracking database, Russia 200, lists nearly 283,000 dead soldiers, including details on the circumstances of their deaths.
However, the organization does not have the means to document every battlefield fatality, and other organizations estimate the death toll to be much higher. The U.K. Foreign Office and Dutch intelligence services estimate Russia's losses to be over half a million, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced in July that 700,000 Russian soldiers had died in Ukraine.
Even the most conservative estimates of Russian losses in Ukraine far surpass the Soviet casualties in Afghanistan, a conflict that lasted nearly a decade. The Kremlin has become increasingly guarded about the true costs of the war, as the protracted conflict has made it more challenging to hide the numbers.
Written by urgent.news from Politico EU's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
