Russia set to spend billions of rubles on storing corpses amid losses in Ukraine

KYIV -- The Kremlin is constructing massive centres to store its dead troops' bodies, according to Ukrainian intelligence.

The need has arisen since Russia invaded Ukraine and began taking heavy casualties.

The storage facilities will be built in Kursk and Rostov-on-Don, Ukrainian military intelligence said in a statement posted on Telegram May 31.

Russian authorities will sort and analyse bodies at the facilities, each of which will be 4,000 square metres and include refrigerators that can hold 1,000 bodies, according to the directorate.

"The Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence notes that [...] Russia is no longer able to hide the extent of its personnel losses in the war against Ukraine," the statement said.

Russia is planning to spend 600 million RUB (about $7 million) on the facility in Rostov-on-Don, and 800 million RUB (about $10 million) on the one in Kursk, it added.

The refrigeration equipment alone will cost the Kremlin an additional 1 billion RUB (about $12 million).

"The construction of these complexes in Muscovy confirms that [Vladimir] Putin's regime is sending its occupying army to a deadly conveyor belt but is not coping with the stream of fatalities," the statement added.

Russian troops have a choice, the directorate noted.

"Any Russian soldier who has not committed war crimes has the option to surrender. If they do not, there's a refrigerator waiting for them in Russia at one of the sorting bases for corpses."

Unwanted

The Kremlin has collided with a reality that is now hard to deny.

More than 20,000 Russian troops died and another 80,000 were wounded in five months of fighting in eastern Ukraine, US officials estimated May 1.

According to Ukrainian estimates, Russian forces have suffered more than 216,000 deaths since launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which contradicts the Kremlin's claims that it has suffered minimal losses in its "special operation".

"The bodies of the fallen soldiers disprove this narrative, so these buildings are being built to hide the truth ... news of the losses will spark distrust and panic among the Russian population," Alina Bondarchuk, director of the Information Collection and Monitoring Department of the Ukrainian Centre for Countering Disinformation in Kyiv, told Caravanserai.

"We believe that these buildings will most likely be large but inconspicuous warehouses meant not to attract unwanted attention," she said.

"The Kremlin previously used mobile crematoria on the front to conceal the truth about its losses. The bodies of occupiers who had been killed were burned, and their relatives were not compensated because the given man was recorded as 'missing'," she added.

The treatment of Russian troops' corpses has further deteriorated amid an influx of new draftees, say observers.

"It's total mayhem with these soldiers who have been killed," Volodymyr Molchanov, an analyst at the Black Sea Centre for Political and Social Research in Kherson, told Caravanserai.

Russian troops "often finish off [wounded comrades] themselves, abandon the wounded to the randomness of fate or rob the corpses", he added.

"This doesn't reflect some governmental system so much as it does the character of the men in these newly conscripted forces," Molchanov said.

"On top of that, there aren't many men who want to go fight. Now the Ministry of Defence has resorted to the Wagner Group's tactics and started hiring prisoners," he said, referring to a mercenary force that helped invade Ukraine. "Feuding is arising among the soldiers. That also affects this situation."

Another goal of these macabre warehouses is identifying the dead, according to Molchanov.

"They have military units that have no standard records of their men, no genetic material collected from the soldiers who are sent to the front, and no ID tags. It's very common for draftees to be sent into war without it being clear how they got there," he said.

As Russian families search for their dead relatives, the storage centres are "how the authorities are trying to somehow do everything in a civilised way since the unit commanders are incapable of organising this process".

An intentional policy

Last year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy even addressed Russian servicemen directly, urging them at least to tattoo their names on their bodies so that the Ukrainians would be able to identify them and contact their relatives.

"The Russian authorities have an intentional policy: to hide their losses. This policy is essentially based on not agitating the population since it's already evident that the war isn't going according to plan," Dmytro Levus, a Kyiv-based political analyst at the think-tank United Ukraine, told Caravanserai.

In addition, the Ukrainians' treatment of their own casualties may have influenced the Russians, according to Levus.

"They might never have paid attention to their losses and to how they should treat their fallen, but Ukraine is behaving differently," he said.

"Ukraine always tries to bring back the bodies of its warriors, and the Russians see this. It turned out that this is also important for them. I think that ... the Russians are trying to emulate the Ukrainians."

"It's possible that generally speaking this isn't very important for the Russian people, but there are Muslim populations in Russia who cannot be overlooked. They care about how bodies are buried -- it's important to perform the ritual," Levus said.