In a deserted village of Krasnopillia in northern Donetsk, a group of volunteers set about the grim task of extracting two rotted Russian corpses from a cellar next to a destroyed house.

    Ukrainian army volunteers carry out a grueling mission in a deserted village in March 2023 to search for and collect Russian corpses. In the deserted village of Krasnopyria in northern Donetsk Oblast, a group of volunteers set about the grueling task of removing two decomposing Russian corpses from a basement next to a destroyed house. 

   Two Russian soldiers in summer uniforms were placed in a basement, presumably by Russian soldiers during the fighting. The nearby village of Krasnopylia in the city of Izium was fought over between Ukrainians and Russians many times before the Ukrainian army recaptured it in September 2022. It is not far from Izyum City. Then two bodies were so decomposed by March 2023 that they had almost no odor and could only be identified by their identification tags.

　Other bodies of Russian soldiers were incinerated by the locals and the Russian military for sanitary reasons. Between 10 and 15 Russian soldiers were deliberately incinerated in a large pit. The bodies of thousands of missing Russian soldiers were unofficially disposed of. The piles of corpses were about two meters high and became not a morgue but a huge garbage dump. on February 22, Russian authorities restricted the release of the corpses of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine.

　They collected the corpses of Russian soldiers to be exchanged for the corpses of Ukrainian soldiers. Unless the bodies are released, the state cannot declare the soldiers dead. The process of removing the bodies is extremely dangerous. Like many areas that have been de-occupied, Krasnopylia was littered with anti-personnel mines. The Russians used remote mining to disperse the mines from the air. The mines were planted on corpses and houses before the Russians withdrew.

　Ukrainian body-collecting volunteers belonging to the Black Tulip group have exhumed about 311 dead Russian soldiers from de-occupied areas since February 2022. Consisting of about 10 people, they searched for corpses in de-occupied areas and on the front lines, as well as in Ukrainian military units; the corpses of two Russian soldiers were examined and their belongings, including money, identity cards, and documents, were registered and scheduled for exchange for the corpses of Ukrainian soldiers after a forensic examination. The exchange of corpses between Russian and Ukrainian troops . On February 17, British intelligence reported that the Russian army lost about 175,000 soldiers in the war in Ukraine.