Abandoned Bodies or burned to make them “disappear”. Censored Media and families forced not to report, even if they haven’t heard from loved ones on the front lines for weeks. This is like to fly it covers up its dead and tries to hide the fate of the conflict from the eyes of its public opinion.
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TO 41 days after the invasionin the official counts of the Russian Ministry of Defense the number of victims of “the special military operation”. Ukraine it is still 1,351. But in reality there are many more: according to NATO sources it would be at least 7,000 men, while for the Kyiv government Russian losses are estimated at 13,000.
Data too uncomfortable for Russiawhile a supposed blitzkrieg turns into a war of attrition that not only costs economic lives but also immense human lives. Often lives very young: It is estimated that a quarter of Moscow’s soldiers are young conscripts (between 18 and 27 years old) who are sent to the front lines with no military experience or training, often with deception telling them it is “special training”.
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Nameless victims of a denied war
It can’t be the victims in one war that does not exist. This is the paradoxical line of Moscow, which continues to deny the ongoing conflict against all evidence, calling it a special military operation. Therefore, even if the number of dead Russian soldiers continues to rise, the exact numbers and the identities of those killed remain top secret.
“There is evidence of increasing pressure on local journalists in Russia to cover military casualties,” he tweeted Iryna Vereshchuk, the Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine, “some of the first publications about fallen soldiers have been stopped”. A fact also confirmed by a Russian journalist who told the BBC that “all local media have been ordered by the regional government not to publish data on casualties in Ukraine”.
Zelenskyj: Putin has ordered that the corpses disappear
But it’s not just about censorship or hiding information. The bodies of the dead soldiers would even disappear fiscally or be abandoned to avoid bringing them back to their homes. President of Ukraine Zelenskyy has indicted Putin having ordered the cremation of the bodies of the fallen.
And when The Guardian, citing British intelligence sources, reported that Russian units had portable incinerators with them “to burn the bodies of the dead,” Ukraine’s Union news agency released a video showing dozens of bodies they had left in plastic bags on the street nearby shows Nikolaev. It would be the corpses of the Russian military, which Moscow does not want to salvage and, According to the Union, their documents show that they are about 20yearold boys. Not far away, on March 9, in the Chaplinka region on the Crimean border, eyewitnesses told UNIAN reporters that the bodies of about 50 Russian soldiers killed in the Kherson and Nikolaev regions were dumped in a pit and burned became.
The same press agency also published a document of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation dated February 26, signed by Deputy Defense Minister Alexei Kryvoruchko, ordering the destruction of the bodies of soldiers killed in Ukraine.
The failure to recover the bodies of fallen soldiers was also voiced by the International Red Crosswhich reports the thesis of the Ukrainian authorities that this choice was made in order not to count the casualties in the official bulletin and not to have to show the Russian population that what is happening in Kyiv is a fullfledged war.
A new “Plaza de Mayo”: the mothers of Russian soldiers and those of the “disappeared”
But for every Russian soldier who died in Ukraine, there is one a family at home who waits and asks the state for the truth. Or at least get back a body to cry on. But families, like journalists, have also been forced to remain silent, as a Russian journalist told the BBC: “There are instances where local officials have put pressure on victims’ families and ordered them to remain silent. They say that now there is no need to make a fuss and that it will be found later a way to commemorate the fallen“.
An answer that is not enough. So much so that hundreds of mothers of Russian soldiers collected a NovokuznetskCity with over half a million inhabitants in southcentral Russia denies the “hidden” deaths of this “denied” war and accused the region’s governor, Sergei Tsivilyov, of sending his children to the front as “cannon fodder”.
Law made ‘military deaths a state secret’ since 2015
The practice of hide the fallen soldiers it is not new to Russia. In 2015, after the annexation of Crimea, a decree added peacetime military casualties to the list of state secrets. The goal is not to further fuel street protests against the war: for the same purpose, the propaganda of the national media is also needed, which in no way speaks of an invasion or an armed conflict.