Russian security services have launched a brutal suppression of people photographing war graves as the Kremlin struggles to conceal the vast scale of its casualties in Ukraine.
Politico reportedthat a middle-aged man in Yaroslavl, western Russia, was handed a 14-year sentence in a penal colony in September for photographing the graves of Russians killed in Ukraine. The harsh sentence is usually reserved for the worst crimes, such as murder.
According to the outlet, Russian security agents are patrolling graveyards and detaining those who photograph war graves, then trying them in secret courts under national security laws. It says several dozen people have been arrested.
A guard at a Russian war memorial in Kursk.
The crackdown comes as leaks exposed the enormous number of Russians killed in the four-year Ukraine conflict.
This week, a Russianhacking group leaked data from Russia’s statistics agency showing that 400,000 Russians had been killed in Ukraine, making the war the country’s fourth most common cause of death.
The figures roughly correspond to those released by the U.K.’s GCHQ intelligence agency in May, which claimed that 500,000 Russians had been killed.
Putin delivers a speech at a pro-war rally in Moscow in 2022.
Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images
Since launching the unprovoked Ukraine invasion in 2022, the Kremlin has imposed a brutal free speech crackdown, imprisoning thousands of people who’ve criticized the war on trumped-up national security charges.
But Putin is increasingly struggling to insulate Russians from the impact of the conflict, with Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian refineries causing fuel shortages, and Moscow itself being targeted in multiple attacks.
Independent news outlets in Russia have tracked the scale of Russia’s deaths in Ukraine by photographing the gravestones of the war dead and tracking announcements of deaths in local media—exposing official Kremlin casualty figures as lies.
Russian journalists told Politico there had been a huge increase in the number of court proceedings where soldiers are declared dead or missing, with the number rising from around 40,000 cases to 90,000 in just six months last year. The Kremlin has now declared the hearings classified.
The Kremlin last released official war fatality figures in 2022, when it said that 6,000 men had been killed, seven months into the conflict.
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