Russian military leaders in the Ukrainian region of Donetsk Oblast secretly piled the corpses of Russian soldiers killed in action in a large dump. Russian military authorities covered up the casualty rate of Russian troops by claiming that the dead were missing.

Russian military leaders in the Ukrainian region of Donetsk Oblast secretly piled the corpses of Russian soldiers killed in action in a large dump. Russian military authorities covered up the casualty rate of Russian troops by claiming that the dead were missing. The Ukrainian Security Service has been sending families back to the Russian military to search for them. The Russian military records soldiers killed in action in Ukraine as missing and does not release the real numbers. The bodies of about 200 Russian soldiers piled up in an improvised body dump, with the piles of corpses reaching a height of about 2 meters.

  Ukrainian military officials claimed that they had intercepted several phone calls between Russian troops, which the Russian military authorities said they had used the massive dump to cover up the losses that Russian troops had sustained since the invasion began on February 24, 2022. A Russian soldier leaked clandestine information during the calls after his wife urged him to speak. He said he went to Donetsk Oblast and found his dead brother. He said he saw a dumping ground for corpses. There was no place to put the body, the body was in the dump, and the body was as tall as a man, the Russian soldier said, and the conversation was intercepted for two and a half minutes. He told his wife on the phone, adding that the dump was fenced off and no one had access to the bodies. One of the body dumps was in Donetsk Oblast, where hundreds of dead Russian soldiers were piled up and left exposed to the elements.

　　The Russian military simply dumped them in mass graves and then pretended that they had disappeared without a trace, ending up missing. Al Jazeera released video footage of a refrigerated train containing the unclaimed bodies of Russian soldiers killed in action in Ukraine. White bags containing human corpses were stacked among them.

　Ukrainian military authorities retrieved the corpses of Russian soldiers as Russian troops withdrew from the Kiev region. Some of the corpses were soiled and decomposed, unclaimed and in military uniform. Ukrainian military authorities stated that Russian military authorities refused to take back the bodies of Russian soldiers in order to keep the death toll down. They suggested that the Russian military, not the civilian population, oversee the payment of compensation to the families of the dead servicemen. This reflected a desire to hide the true scale of the damage caused by the Russian military from the Russian domestic population. Moscow authorities secretly transported the bodies of dead Russian soldiers from Ukraine to Belarus, where they were treated posthumously out of public view.

　The Ukrainian military estimated that about 25,000 more Russian soldiers have died since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24, entering its third month, while NATO estimated that about 15,000 Russian soldiers have died. Russian military officials, on the other hand, claimed a much lower figure of about 1,300. The pro-Moscow tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda said about 9,861 Russian soldiers were killed and about 16,153 wounded in the nearly three-month invasion of Ukraine. Before being removed, the tabloid claimed the figures came from the Russian Defense Ministry.

Warning: During the reoccupation of the village of Vilkhivka, East of Kharkiv by Ukraine's 92nd Mechanized Infantry Brigade on March 30th, 2022, a series of mass graves were discovered. They are believed to be members of Russia's 59th Tank Regiment Approximately 90 bodies were found unburied in hastily dug mass graves (SOFREP, May 12, 2023).