The first warm, sunny days of spring in the southern Mykolaiv region are ushering in a grim new reality: the smell of the dead.

As the frost melts and ground thaws, the bodies of Russian soldiers strewn across the landscape are becoming a problem.
In his nightly video address on Saturday, Vitaly Kim, the region's governor, called on local residents to help collect the corpses and put them in bags, as temperatures rise to above freezing. "We're not beasts, are we?" he implored residents, who have already lost so many of their own in this war.
Mykolaiv was among the first regional capitals to be attacked after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine on February 24. After pushing into the urban center, Russian troops have been forced out by Ukraine's military, leaving a trail of blackened combat vehicles and tanks in their wake. But the battle for the city, a cornerstone in Russia's westward quest along the Black Sea coast to Odesa, is still raging and it's unclear how long Ukrainian forces will be able to fend off the assault.

Referring to them as "orcs"— the evil, monstrous army in J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" — Kim said that the Russians had retreated and left their colleagues' charred bodies behind on the battlefield. He sent CNN pictures of the abandoned corpses, adding: "There are hundreds of them, all over the region."
The governor has called for the bodies to be placed into refrigerators and sent back to Russia for identification through DNA testing. But, a month into the war, it is still unclear how or if the remains of soldiers are being repatriated to Russia, where reports about the death toll have largely been silenced. The country has cracked down on any information about the realities of the bloody war, restricting access to Western media reports, as well as the social networks Twitter and Facebook, in Russian territory.

Exactly how many Russian troops have been killed in Ukraine remains a mystery. The official line from Russia's defense ministry was 498 military personnel until Monday, when pro-Putin Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda published a report updating the toll to 9,861. The figure, which was attributed to the ministry and later retracted by the paper — which claimed it was hacked — has not been confirmed by the Kremlin, whose spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Tuesday told CNN: "As far as the numbers are concerned, we agreed from the very beginning that we do not divulge the information."
That number tallies with information shared with CNN by US and NATO officials, who gave a recent estimate that Russian casualties range from between 3,000 and 10,000. Ukrainian officials have claimed the toll is even higher, at more than 15,000. CNN has been unable to verify the overall number of Russian deaths.
One of the most searing, early images of the war in Ukraine was of a dead Russian soldier, his face and body obscured by a dusting of newly fallen snow. The picture, shot by New York Times photojournalist Tyler Hicks, captured the anonymity of the more than 150,000 Russians sent to fight their neighbors — and the anxiety of Russian families desperate to find out any information about their fate.
The Ukrainian government has claimed that the Russian army sent mobile crematoriums to burn their own dead. "The Russian people dying here, nobody is counting them, people dying in this war. Do you know they have brought a cremation chamber with them? They're not going to show the bodies to their families. They're not going to tell the mothers that their children died here," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told reporters in a briefing on March 3.
On the same day, Ukrzaliznytsia, the state-owned Ukrainian Railways, said in a statement on its website that it had provided Ukraine's armed forces with 20 refrigerated cars for the removal of dead Russian soldiers from several areas, including Odesa. Just 72 hours later, Ukrzaliznytsia's chairman posted a message on his personal Telegram channel saying that Russia never came to load them. "For the sake of 'victorious' propaganda, they are ready to deprive mothers of even the opportunity to bury the bodies," Oleksandr Kamyshin wrote.
Ukraine's government said it is still waiting to receive a request from Russian authorities for the repatriation of the bodies of those killed. The Ukrainian deputy prime minister said the issue of collecting and identifying the bodies had been discussed in a meeting between Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal and the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Peter Maurer, on Thursday. But the ICRC has not confirmed whether it is assisting Ukraine in the return of Russian remains to their home country, which is provided for under international law.
Hints at the scale of Russia's troop losses have begun to emerge in videos and reports. On March 18, the Belarus service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a US-funded media organization, published images of Russian ambulance convoys appearing to arrive at field hospitals in southern Belarus, near Ukraine's border, and reported that morgues in the area were overflowing. A March 21 report by English-language Ukrainian media outlet The Kyiv Independent followed a Ukrainian emergency response unit digging up Russian soldiers buried in unmarked communal graves in Rusaniv, a village east of the capital — left in a heap without identification documents or IDs.



https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/23/europe/ukraine-war-russian-soldiers-deaths-cmd-intl/index.html

Source...CNN

merit455:
Source...CNN

What's your preferred source?

At least they have someone on ground

I heard that some , if not most, are paid merceneries from Syria and Chechen fighters.

It is a strategy President Putin adopted to ensure that most of the staggering number of the dead are not Russian citizens in order to prevent a protest by mothers and families within Russia.

Once winter is over in few days, the stench from the corpses will make those Ukrainian cities and villages inhabitable and lead to disease outbreak.

The world should pray that God touches the heart of President Putin to please stop this war.

Putin, Pls end the war

Rubbish.

Whether they are Russian soldiers or Ukrainians or from anywhere else the indisputable fact is that they are human beings. No course is worth the blood of even one of them. I pray the war end soon. #Seriously!


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CNN? Lmao. Propaganda at its peak.