How many soldiers have been killed since the start of the war in Ukraine? kyiv estimates that it lost around 3,000 and claims that 25,000 Russians died, but Moscow gives no figures from its side and speaks of ” significant losses “. The Ukrainians communicate in any case on the fate of the Russian soldiers who would be recovered on the battlefields, to be sent back to Moscow. Report from the morgue in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city.
With our special envoys Murielle Paradon and Sami Boukhelifa
When one enters the courtyard of the morgue in Kharkiv, an acrid smell takes hold of one’s throat. Corpses, barely hidden behind a tarpaulin, are lined up next to each other, on the ground. Men equipped with overalls and gloves bustle about while the director of the morgue comes to meet us. Yuri Nikolaevich is a silent man, but he agrees to show us, in a tent apart, two bodies with blackened limbs, dressed in military uniforms: they are, he says, Russian soldiers.
exchanges of bodies
” These soldiers have been on the battlefield for more than a month, that’s why they are in this state… They have just been examined. Then we will put them in a refrigerated place and we will send them to the Russian Federation. There is a special group within the Ministry of Defense called “cargo 200”. They are soldiers, who exchange bodies. We recover our dead soldiers from the other side of the front in the same way. These are the Geneva conventions and we respect them. There are not, as some would have us believe, bodies that we keep, by burying them or burning them. »
Many rumors circulate, indeed, on the fate of the Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine. But difficult to know more. The director also refuses to tell us how many of these fighters have been taken to his morgue since the start of the conflict. On one side or the other of the front, the number of soldiers who died in combat remains a sensitive subject.