The Kremlin can hide the death toll. It can’t hide the graves.

Detailed summary

As the war in Ukraine drags on, Moscow is taking great pains to suppress casualty figures by closing databases and prosecuting those who document the dead.

In September, a Russian court condemned a middle-aged man in Yaroslavl to 14 years in a penal colony — a sentence usually reserved for the country’s most twisted killers. His crime? Taking photographs of gravestones of Russian soldiers who died in Ukraine.

With the Kremlin coy about battlefield casualty figures, independent journalists and activists have used photography to document the war’s true death toll, revealing losses far greater than Moscow has publicly acknowledged.

“The multiplying number of graves — that must be a sight that’s bothering the authorities very much because it reminds them of the failure of Putin’s war,” Jan C. Behrends of the German-based Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History said. “So many people have died.”

In recent months, Russian authorities have issued warnings that taking photographs of military graves could result in life imprisonment, while the Federal Security Service has patrolled the country’s cemeteries in search of offenders. Since the summer, several dozen people across Russia have been arrested. The official charge in these closed trials is treason — specifically, cooperation with Ukrainian intelligence services.

Russia’s losses since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine are staggering. Russia 200, a casualty-tracking database created by independent outlet Mediazona and the BBC’s Russian service, lists the names of nearly 283,000 dead soldiers, including details about the circumstances of their deaths. But Mediazona, which draws on open-source information like social media posts and reports in local media, does not have the resources and access to document every battlefield fatality.

Other organizations estimate the death toll to be significantly higher. The U.K. Foreign Office and Dutch intelligence services estimate Russia’s losses to stand at more than half a million, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced in July that 700,000 Russian soldiers had died fighting in Ukraine.

Even the most modest…

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