Shipping dead with Putin’s air fleet: “Avoid panic”

Shipping dead with Putins air fleet Avoid panic

Published: Just now

Dead bodies pile up in a military hospital near the Ukrainian border.

Then the cargoes are flown out into the regions by Putin’s government fleet, according to a review by The Moscow Times.

– We received 28 bodies, but were only allowed to release one or two per day to avoid panic, says a mortuary employee.

The independent Russian news site has examined how the Russian leadership’s own fleet of aircraft is secretly being used to take the bodies of dead soldiers back to their home regions.

They have used data from sites such as Flight Radar, posts on social media from relatives of fallen soldiers and interviewed relatives and staff at morgues.

In the review, the newspaper discovered a pattern where funerals are conducted shortly after one of the 60 planes in the fleet lands at a nearby airport.

full screen Government Navy Tupolev Tu-154 marked “Russia”.

Scary many dead

According to The Moscow Times, many are taken of the soldiers who died in the fighting in eastern Ukraine first to a military hospital in Rostov in southern Russia, less than ten miles from the Ukrainian border.

There they are then collected in cold rooms for further transport by the air fleet.

– When I was there, I saw six large hearses that reeked of death, says a man, who was at the hospital in Rostov to identify his father who died in the war, to the newspaper.

– I saw how they were unloaded. Zinc chest on zinc chest. It was terrifying to see, even for me who works in an intensive care unit and has seen dead people. But never so many before.

Rossiya Airlines, which belongs to state-owned Aeroflot, provides a total of 68 airplanes and helicopters for the Kremlin.

Released one by one

Among these is the Russian equivalent of Air Force One. Others are cargo planes.

Among the examples mentioned by The Moscow Times in its review is a flight to the city of Nizhnekamsk in Tatarstan.

In a video, eleven zinc chests are seen being unloaded from a van in the city. A name is written on one of the coffins. A person with that name is later buried in the same city according to social media posts.

Sources for The Moscow Times out in the regions states that the bodies are received in large quantities, but released to relatives in batches.

For example, at the end of November, a mortuary in the Orenburg region received 28 dead soldiers who died in Ukraine.

full screen Russian helicopters in Ukraine. Photo: AP
full screen Russian soldiers in Ukraine. Photo: AP

Want to avoid panic

But according to an employee at the mortuary, they had strict instructions from the authorities to release only one or two of the bodies a day.

– We are a small town. To release so many dead at once would create panic, says the employee.

– The authorities also want to avoid a situation where there are queues of relatives outside the mortuary. People could faint and make a scandal. In general, they have decided not to escalate the situation.

Western sources have stated that as many as 180,000 Russian soldiers may have been killed and wounded in Ukraine since the war began.

According to The Moscow Times can be confirmed that at least 14,000 were killed through reviews of open sources such as news articles and social media posts.

full screen Heavy weapons are fired in Ukraine. Photo: LIBKOS / AP

Is low with the numbers

The Russian Ministry of Defense has not updated its own death toll since September. At the time, a little less than 6,000 dead were reported.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russia has suffered “extraordinarily significant” losses in Donetsk during fighting on the eastern front.

– I repeat once more: The more Russia loses there, the faster we can end this war with victory for Ukraine, he says.

Ukraine is also said to have suffered heavy losses on the eastern front.

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