Concealing its Casualty Rate From its own Population by Claiming the Dead are “Missing.”
The Russian military leaders in the Donetsk are piling the dead bodies of their fallen soldiers in secret “massive dumps” and are charging their families back to Russia to find them, according to the Security Service of Ukraine. They are also reportedly listing those troops killed in Ukraine as “missing” so that they do not have to publicize the real numbers.
“Russia is recording killed soldiers on the list of [the missing],” Ukraine’s security service said. “Their bodies are made up on improvised dumps, where ‘two hundred’ are so many that the mountains of corpses reach two meters high.”
The agency claims to have intercepted several phone calls between Russian troops who have admitted to using “massive dumps” to cover up mounting losses the Russian military has been taking since the invasion began.
Here is one version of the translated intercepted message:
“It’s better that you don’t hear this,” a Russian soldier says during the call, referring to a certain woman named “Inna,” whose brother was found a month ago. He hesitates to tell the woman (possibly his wife) at the other end of the line, but after a bit of urging, he spills the information and says that “Inna” had gone to Donetsk and found his dead brother. There, “Inna” reportedly saw a “dump.”
One of the said dumps is in Donetsk, where hundreds of dead Russian troops were reportedly piled on top of one another, left to be eaten up by the elements.
“They just toss them there. And then later, it’s easier to make as if they disappeared without a trace. It’s easier for them to pretend they are just missing, and that’s it,” he said.
“There’s nowhere left to place them. It’s a dump. I’m telling you in plain Russian—a dump. It’s as tall as a person,” a supposed Russian soldier told his wife in a two and a half minute intercepted phone call, adding that the place was fenced so that nobody could access the remains.
The person speaking also claimed that the Russian army is making “crazy money” by offering assistance to relatives in finding their deceased loved one’s remains.
According to the Russian soldier, the whole thing was a “f*cking nightmare” and emphasized that it was “not a morgue.”
This disturbing phone call comes after video footage of refrigerated train cars containing unclaimed remains of fallen Russian soldiers in Ukraine was released by Al Jazeera. Inside, you will see white bags that appear to contain human bodies stacked on top of each other. The bodies of those in the trains were reportedly from an elite group of Russian paratroopers. Upon inspection, the Russian soldiers were found to have looted jewelry stolen from Ukrainian civilians.
https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1524020962999648257
The Ukrainian authorities collected the bodies as the Russian army retreated from the Kyiv region. The clips also show dirty and decaying body parts of the unclaimed carcasses still wearing military fatigues.
They said that Moscow refused to take in the dead bodies of their own soldiers to keep death tolls low.
The intercepted phone call goes with recent intelligence reports from the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense.
“Russia’s Ministry of Defense has proposed compensation payments for the families of deceased service personnel be overseen by the military rather than civilian officials. This likely reflects a desire to hide the true scale of Russia’s losses from the domestic population,” wrote the report in a tweet.
The war is in its third month, but so far, there is still no clear-cut victor as the Russian forces have been fairing very poorly amidst the Ukrainian defensive mechanisms.
Ukraine claims that over 25,000 Russian fighters have died since the start of the invasion on February 24. NATO’s estimates are closer to 15,000 as SOFREP as reported prior. On the other hand, Russia claims a much lower figure at around 1,300. We believe that the NATO estimates are more accurate for obvious reasons.
In a rare admittance, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that the Russian army has suffered significant losses in their “special military operation.”
“We have significant losses of troops,” Peskov said during a live interview. “It’s a huge tragedy for us.”
Komsomolskaya Pravda, a pro-Moscow tabloid, reported that approximately 10,000 Russian soldiers had been killed in the fighting in Ukraine before the page was swiftly deleted from the site.
It said that 9,861 Russian soldiers have died and 16,153 were injured in the 3-month-long invasion of Ukraine. Before they were removed, the tabloid claimed that the figures came from the Russian Ministry of Defense.
The Kremlin has gone to great lengths to keep the real casualty figures away from the Russian population. In addition to piling bodies in “secret dumps,” there have been reports of Moscow secretly transporting the remains of their soldiers from Ukraine into Belarus to keep them from the eyes of the public.
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