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By Brendan Cole
Senior Reporter
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Russian forces are cremating their troops killed in Ukraine to cover up the extent of the losses they are facing, according to Kyiv.
Ukraine's Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said that hundreds of Russian troops were being killed in the east and the south of the country every day, as Kyiv continues the counteroffensive it started around June 4 to recapture occupied Russian territory.
Maliar said on Telegram that Moscow's command is trying to hide the losses by disposing of the bodies in occupied territories, rather than transporting the remains back to Russia. Newsweek has been unable to verify Maliar's claims.
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Maliar said that Russian forces were bringing the dead from the Kherson oblast to a morgue in the region's Chaplinsky district. Meanwhile, near Russian-occupied city of Melitopol in the Zaporizhzhia region, she added that "the bodies of Russian servicemen are being cremated almost continuously in an open area."
Maliar said the bodies are being brought to the site on trucks and that "local residents have been smelling the characteristic acrid smoke for a long time." Newsweek has contacted the Russian Defense Ministry for comment about the claims.
It comes during a week in which Kyiv said that the number of Russian troops who had been "liquidated" since the start of the war had surpassed 250,000. While Russia has not updated its death toll since the figure of just under 6,000 it released in September 2022, other tolls are much lower.
"It is very difficult to determine casualties in an ongoing conflict since both sides will try to keep the data secret and inflate the number of adversary casualties," Marina Miron, a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of War Studies at King's College London, U.K., previously told Newsweek.
Independent Russian language news outlets Meduza and Media Zone said up to 55,000 Russian men under 50 had died fighting in Ukraine by the end of May. The counteroffensive was launched a week later during which Russia is believed to have suffered heavy losses.
Gregory Vitarbo, history professor at Meredith College in North Carolina, told Newsweek that even if Ukraine's figures are "inflated, it is nevertheless still true that Russia has suffered an enormous number of casualties in this conflict."
"For grim comparisons' sake, the Russians lost 15,000 killed in 10 years of their war in Afghanistan, while the U.S. had 58,000 killed in approximately 20 years in Vietnam," Vitarbo said.
"Even worse, anecdotal reports and videos from the field indicate that the numbers of dead are much higher than they need be due to poor Russian combat medical practices and logistics," Vitarbo said. "All of this for a special military operation that was supposed to be over in a few days."
Russian lawmakers have increased the pool of potential troops, by raising the maximum age of conscription from 27 to 30 and making it harder for men to avoid the draft through a series of measures. These include issuing electronic summons which if ignored, result in increase fines and restrictions on leaving the country.
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