As the frost melts and the ground melts, the bodies of Russian soldiers are scattered across the landscape, becoming a problem.
In his nightly video address on Saturday, the region’s governor Vitaly Kim called on local residents to help collect the corpses and pack them in bags as temperatures rise above freezing. “We’re not animals, are we?” He urged the residents, who had already lost many of their men in this war.
Referring to them as “Orcs”—the evil, demonic army in JRR Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”—Kim said the Russians had retreated and left behind the charred bodies of their allies on the battlefield. Had given. He sent CNN photos of the abandoned corpses, saying: “There are hundreds of them all over the area.”
The governor has called for the bodies to be kept in refrigerators and sent back to Russia for identification through DNA testing. But, a month into the war, it is still unclear how or if the remains of soldiers are being returned to Russia, where reports about the death toll have been largely silenced. The country has cracked down on any information about the realities of the bloody war, restricting access in Russian territory to Western media reports, as well as to social networks Twitter and Facebook.
Exactly how many Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine remains a mystery. The official line of Russia’s defense ministry stood at 498 military personnel as of Monday, when pro-Putin Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda published a report that updated the toll to 9,861. The figure, which was attributed to the ministry and later retracted by the paper – which claimed it was hacked – has not been confirmed by the Kremlin, whose spokesman Dmitry Peskov told CNN on Tuesday. : “As far as numbers are concerned, we agree from the outset we do not disclose information.”
The number matches information shared with CNN by US and NATO officials, who recently estimated Russian casualties to be between 3,000 and 10,000. Ukrainian officials have claimed the death toll is even higher, at more than 15,000. CNN has been unable to verify the total number of Russian deaths.
The Ukrainian government has claimed that the Russian military sent mobile crematoriums to burn their own dead. “The Russians are dying here, no one is counting them, the people who died in this war. Do you know they brought a crematorium with them? They’re not going to show the bodies to their families. They tell Not going mothers that their children died here,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told reporters at a briefing on March 3.
On the same day, the state-owned Ukrainian Railways, Ukrzaliznitsia, said in a statement on its website that it had provided Ukraine’s armed forces with 20 refrigerated cars for the evacuation of dead Russian soldiers from several regions, including Odessa. Exactly 72 hours later, the president of Ukrzaliznytsia posted a message on his private Telegram channel saying that Russia never came to load them. For the sake of “victorious” propaganda, they are ready to deprive mothers of even the opportunity to bury bodies, ” wrote Oleksandr Kamyshin.
Ukraine’s government said it was still waiting to receive requests from Russian authorities to bring back the bodies of those killed. Ukraine’s deputy prime minister said the issue of collecting and identifying bodies was discussed at a meeting on Thursday between Prime Minister Denis Shyamal and the chairman of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Peter Maurer. But the ICRC has not confirmed whether it is helping Ukraine repatriate Russian remains to their home country, which is provided for by international law.
A website and Telegram channel set up by the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs aimed at Russian families publishes a steady stream of photographs of dead soldiers and captured youths, sometimes with their identity cards. The site name, 200rf.com, Gruz-200, or Cargo-200, is a military code word used for the bodies of soldiers by the Soviet Union during the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, a serious signal. Placed in zinc-lined coffins for transport.
Viktor Andrusyev, an adviser to Ukraine’s Minister of Internal Affairs and the channel’s producer and coordinator, also known as “Look for Your Own”, said he helped Russian families track information about their soldiers. initiated for “We are not waging war against the Russian people. And I don’t think they should suffer because of their regime, which is a lie to them and says that everything is good, no one is dying,” he told CNN told. “It’s a way for us to bring them some truth.”
But identifying the dead Russian soldiers has been a difficult task. Andrasiv said only 30 have been found by their relatives on the Telegram channel, who scan through gruesome images of those killed in action for clues whether their loved ones were alive or dead. Ukrainian forces send images of uninhabited bodies to Andrusov, but they are often unrecognizable and with no documentation on them.
“It is very difficult to identify the dead because usually they don’t have documents, usually the commander takes their documents and puts them in some boxes. Usually they die in this fire, in gunfire. And you can’t identify the metal ‘dog.’ tag, where their number is written, it doesn’t give us any information about that person,” Andrusive said.
And as March turns into April, and temperatures soar to nearly 60 degrees Fahrenheit, the problem is only going to get worse.
“The problem with Russian bodies is really huge. It’s thousands of them. Before the war, the weather was cold, it was fine but now we have problems because the Russians don’t want to take bodies,” Andrusev said. “I really don’t know what we’ll do with his body in the next weeks.”
Alexandra Ochman contributed to this report.