The bodies of Russian soldiers, already decomposed and bleached, lying on the frontline in the Sloviansk region of Ukraine, were autopsied one by one by the Ukrainian Corpses Recovery Unit on 24 October 2023.

  The bodies of Russian soldiers, already decomposed and bleached, lying on the frontline in the Sloviansk region of Ukraine, were autopsied by the Ukrainian Corpses Recovery Unit on 24 October 2023. The real victims of the Russian-Ukrainian war are the corpses. The Ukrainian units recovering the corpses autopsied the war dead one by one. The bodies of Russian soldiers killed in action were loaded onto refrigerated trucks.

    The Siege of Sloviansk broke out in the Donbass War from 12 April 2014 to 5 July 2014. Sloviansk's Russian-backed separatists declared the Donetsk People's Republic's independence from Ukraine on 7 April. After three months of heavy fighting between Ukrainian and Donetsk People's Republic forces, pro-Russian rebels retreated to Donetsk and Ukrainian forces retook Sloviansk on 5 July. Sloviansk is a city in Donetsk Oblast, in the northern part of the Donbass region. During World War II, it was filled with the corpses of German and Soviet soldiers.

    More than 50,000 Russian servicemen have been killed in action in Ukraine since the Russian-Ukrainian war began on 24 February 2022, the BBC reported on 17 April 2024, based on its own research. This is more than eight times the number of war deaths officially acknowledged by the Russian military. The BBC referred to the way Russian soldiers were deployed as Mincer tactics.

Since the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war, the independent Russian news media MediaZona and BBC Russia, together with volunteers, have investigated the number of casualties. To do so, they analysed official reports, social media, newspaper reports and other official sources. By examining headstones in Russian cemeteries, they were able to identify the names of many servicemen. The absolute number of war dead is even higher, as the investigators were unable to trace the origin of all the bodies. This does not include servicemen killed in action in the Russian-occupied areas of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine.

   Both the Russian and Ukrainian armed forces rarely reveal the scale of casualties of the war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced in February 2024 that 31,000 Ukrainian servicemen had died. Previous analyses suggested that the Ukrainian military suffered much higher casualties.

 

Warning: Oleksii Yukov examines the body of a Russian soldier he collected on the frontline in the Sloviansk region, Ukraine, Oct. 24, 2023. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)