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.

Melitopol residents taking to the streets to prevent their city from being captured by the Russians last March (Pravda.com.ua). Source: https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/03/2/7327497/
Melitopol residents taking to the streets to prevent their city from being captured by the Russians last March (Pravda.com.ua)

“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.