2024-04-18 07:53:44
Several hundred graves have been added to the Bogorodskoye cemetery southeast of Moscow over the past year. According to the BBC news service, the number of fallen Russian soldiers in Ukraine has already exceeded 50,000. During the second year of the war, 25 percent more combatants died than in the first year, and overall human losses on the Russian side are eight times higher than Moscow last reported.
The Russian BBC and independent media group Mediazona count deaths on the side of Moscow since February 2022, when the invasion of Ukraine began. Journalists collect information from publicly available sources, newspapers and social networks, volunteers even map Russian cemeteries. Moscow hardly comments on the deaths of its soldiers, the last official statement of the Ministry of Defense from September 2022 spoke of less than six thousand dead.
According to the latest findings, Russia’s territorial gains are being bought at a huge price. More than 27,300 Russian soldiers died during the second year of the war. In addition, the BBC’s analysis does not include the deaths of members of the militia in Russian-occupied Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine. Real losses are thus even higher.
Aerial photographs show that cemeteries on the territory of Russia have significantly expanded. Volunteers have mapped more than 70 of them since the start of the war. The BBC estimates that at least two in five dead Russian fighters are civilians who have never served in the military before.
Analysts have previously described the Kremlin as using a “mass wave” strategy, sending dozens of poorly trained soldiers to die on the front lines to make way for Russia’s more valuable elite units. The head of the Ukrainian Center for Security and Cooperation, Serhiy Kuzan, described in an interview published by the daily Aktuálně.cz on Thursday that Russia leaves the frozen corpses of poorly trained fighters on the battlefield.
“No one is evacuating them. I have the feeling that the Russian soldiers don’t even have a specific task, they just come there and die,” a Ukrainian sniper nicknamed Bess also told CNN.
In turn, the commander of the Ukrainian reconnaissance unit Teren described that even if the Ukrainians and their drones manage to kill dozens of soldiers in a day, the Russians will fully restore their forces the next day and continue the attack.
According to the BBC, these are mostly Russian prisoners, with whom the Kremlin compensates for its losses and sends them into battle to die. Journalists investigated the names of nine thousand prisoners who they knew had died on the front lines. For more than a thousand of them, they found that their military contract began on the day they died.
If military training is given to soldiers, it is usually insufficient. Journalists from the BBC spoke to the families of the deceased fighters. A widow told them that her husband had signed a contract of service in prison on April 8 last year, and three days later had already enlisted. “I was assured that he would be in training for a few weeks and that there would be nothing to worry about until at least the end of April,” said the woman, whose name the BBC has withheld for her safety.
Even Kyiv does not publish data on fallen Ukrainian soldiers. On the anniversary of two years since the start of Russian aggression, however, President Volodymyr Zelenskyi said that 31,000 of them had perished.
“We fight more effectively, we really care about our men and we don’t practice the same methods as Russia. For us, the goal is to take care of wounded soldiers and save as many of them as possible so that they can – if they want – continue to participate in combat or other actions to help the army, ” Kuzan describes in the announced interview.