Published on: 05/16/2022 – 06:57
How many soldiers have been killed in Ukraine since the start of the war? Kyiv estimates that it lost about 3,000 and claims that 25,000 Russians died, but Moscow for its part does not give any figures and speaks of “significant losses”. In any case, the Ukrainians communicate about the fate of the Russian soldiers who were recovered on the battlefields and sent back to Moscow. Report from the morgue in Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine.
With our special envoys Muriel Paradon and Sami Boukhelifa
When you enter the yard of the morgue in Kharkov, a pungent smell rises in your throat. Hardly hidden behind a tarp, corpses are lined up next to each other on the ground. Men in overalls and gloves scurry about as the director of the morgue comes toward us. Yuri Nikolayevich is a taciturn man, but he agrees to show us two corpses with blackened limbs in military uniforms in a separate tent: they are, he says, Russian soldiers.
exchange of corpses
“These soldiers have been on the battlefield for more than a month, that’s why they are in this condition… They have just been examined. Then we put them in a cooled place and send them to the Russian Federation. Within the Ministry of Defense there is a special group called “Cargo 200”. They are soldiers exchanging bodies. In the same way, we recover our dead soldiers from the other side of the front lines. These are the Geneva Conventions and we respect them. There are not, as some would have us believe, corpses that we preserve by burying or burning. »
Yuri Nikolayevich, director of the Kharkiv morgue, May 15, 2022. © RFI / Murielle Paradon
In fact, many rumors circulate about the fate of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine. But it’s difficult to know more. The director also refuses to tell us how many of these fighters have been taken to his morgue since the conflict began. On one side or the other of the front lines, the number of soldiers killed in action remains a sensitive issue.
© RFI