Russia Using a Meatpacking Plant in Ukraine as a Morgue as Casualties Continue to Mount

Russia has awfully been silent about the number of their casualties in Ukraine, but details of their casualties are slowly seeping through their propaganda. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Intelligence Division has recently reported that the Russians are losing so many soldiers that they are forced to use a meatpacking plant in the occupied city of Melitopol to store their dead.

The city of Melitopol had been in Russian hands since the early onset of the invasion in February. A city of 150,000 people and 300,000 more in the surrounding region, they did not get to fight off the Russian forces as they did not have the ample equipment and men to do so. As a result, the Russians took the city quickly.

The Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine recently published a statement regarding the matter. According to them, they have found that the Russian administration currently running the Ukrainian city of Melitopol has resorted to repurposing a meatpacking plant as a morgue. They reportedly first went to the facility on June 6th to study the plant and determine if it was possible to convert it into a morgue as they had nowhere to place their dead.

The company that owned the plant, Aron-M LLC, was just notified by the Russians that they were going to use the plat free of charge to “store the bodies of fallen servicemen.” The Ukrainians also reveal that the Russians no longer have space in the meatpacking plant as more of their dead arrive. If they only used the facility on June 6th, and are now running out of space, then this only means that the Russian casualties are only increasing. Bodies of Russian soldiers that were not stored properly were probably already buried, cremated, or sent back to Russia. This may mean that these bodies are newly killed soldiers, as reports say they were transported from other battlefields.

“It is known that the city meat processing plant, which was converted into a morgue, is already completely filled with the bodies of the murdered occupiers and can no longer accept the ‘cargo of 200’,” they said, indicating that there are “cargoes” of dead Russians arriving in the city.

As a result, the Russians in Melitopol are actively looking for additional freezers and industrial refrigerators to help them with the influx of dead Russians arriving not just from Melitopol itself but from surrounding areas as well. They would have come from the cities of Polohy and Huliaipole in the Zaporizhzhia region, where fighting has been reportedly intense.

“These events are associated with the great losses of the occupiers in manpower. In addition, the long-term storage of the bodies of the murdered is connected with the intentions of the Russian leadership to hide the real scale of losses from the Russian electorate,” the Ukrainians claim. “Therefore, the so-called “dosed” sending of bodies to the Russian Federation and the maximum stretching of this process over time are practiced.”

Is there a basis for their claims? Quite frankly, there is.

SOFREP has reported extensively on Russian casualties and Ukrainian casualties in the war. Ukrainian estimates are currently at 31,700 troops dead. Furthermore, an unnamed Ukrainian official has stated that a Russian soldier dies every 5 minutes in Ukraine. If we do the math, 31,700 Russian soldiers have died in 104 days. So that means around 302 or 303 soldiers die every day. If we divide 303 by 24 (hours), you get 12.6 Russian soldiers dying per hour. This means that the Russians are indeed losing five soldiers per 5 minutes.

People may claim that these are Ukrainian figures, and that is true. However, US intel also puts the number of Russian losses at 20%. So, if Russia had an invasion force of 150,000 men, 20% of this would be 30,000. Furthermore, if we plug in conventional military thought of 2 to 4 soldiers wounded for one soldier dead, then the total number of incapacitated troops would be 60,000 to 120,000 (if we use 30,000 as the baseline).

reportedly in occupied Kadiyivka (former Stakhanov) in the Luhansk region there is a ton of dead russian soldiers, burning right now… https://t.co/IOAOyAs6ib

— Roman Motychak – ATACMS ASAP 🇺🇦 (@motytchak) June 9, 2022

SOFREP believes that the number of incapacitated troops is actually very conservative and that there are more killed than wounded simply because the Russians do not have ample first aid kits and food supply to keep their men in shape. Further reports also say that the Russian forces, mostly conscripts, have no idea how to use first aid kits properly as they were not trained at all before being deployed to Ukraine. These elements would further hamper the Russians’ casualty survival rate, resulting in more dead than wounded. This is further evidenced by the fact that their healthcare system is overwhelmed by the sheer number of wounded troops from the frontlines, as we have reported earlier.

That being said, reports of the Russians running out of space to store their dead may be credible. SOFREP has also reported on instances wherein the Russian forces just left their dead in random ditches throughout Ukraine, possibly because 1. They were too lazy to drag these dead bodies all the way back to Russia, and 2. They are trying to hide their real number of casualties from the Russian public. Further evidence of this can be found in reports of mobile cremation facilities being used by the Russian forces in Ukraine during the first portion of the invasion.

With more Russians dying on the battlefield, the Russians will definitely need more storage places for their dead, otherwise risking them decomposing faster than they can send them back to Russia.