The Kremlin can hide the death toll, but it cannot hide the multiplying graves

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 serious killers. His crime was taking photographs of gravestones of Russian soldiers who died in Ukraine.

Independent journalists and activists have used such photography to document the war's true death toll, revealing losses far greater than Moscow has publicly acknowledged.

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

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 the 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 such as social media posts and reports in local media, does not have the resources and access to document every battlefield fatality.

Other organisations estimate the death toll to be significantly higher. The UK Foreign Office and Dutch intelligence services estimate Russia's losses 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 estimates of Russian losses in Ukraine far surpass Soviet casualties in Afghanistan, a conflict that lasted nearly a decade from its launch in 1979. Then, as now, the Kremlin strove to hide the true costs of war.

Jeff Jones, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, said relatives of those who died in Afghanistan were forbidden from engraving the place of their loved ones' deaths on their gravestones. He said a grave could not be marked in any way that indicated the person had died in the war, and some relatives were actually forced to hold funerals at night so that they would not draw attention. Later, relatives were permitted to engrave the words 'died heroically while fulfilling an international duty', but 'died in Afghanistan' was never allowed.

At the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the Kremlin was not quite so guarded. In September 2022, six months after the start of Moscow's full-scale invasion, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said 5,937 Russian soldiers had died in the conflict. Since then, there have been few official pronouncements about Russian casualties.

In April 2024, a Kremlin spokesperson reminded journalists that information on casualties is a 'state secret' and reporting on losses remains the 'exclusive prerogative of the Ministry of Defense'. Later that year, Rosstat, Russia's official statistical body, barred access to its data on the country's excess death rate, which had been accessible since the 1990s.

Dmitry Treshchanin, a Mediazona editor and co-author of Russia 200, said the Rosstat data was an invaluable source for verifying information on casualties — and for refuting government claims. 'We can count everyone name by name, but someone from government would always say it's fake,' he said. 'But when you have official data confirming our calculations, nothing can be done with it.'

Moscow has also stifled information on court cases concerning dead soldiers. In early 2025, Russian journalists noticed an unprecedented increase in court cases about soldiers being declared missing in action or dead. Military units normally ask courts to declare soldiers dead when they do not return from a battlefield for months.

Treshchanin said the number was growing rapidly — starting with 40,000 cases, then 70,000 four months later, and 90,000 two months after that. Russia 200 recorded almost 90,000 such cases in 2025 — a more than tenfold increase compared with earlier years of the invasion. At the end of 2025, the government classified the proceedings and restricted access to them.

Treshchanin and his colleagues are now cautious about using graveyard photography. He said photos of graves and videos of funerals were an important source at the very beginning of the invasion, when not much other information was available, but once the Kremlin understood the technique it became too dangerous, and their volunteers were attacked at cemeteries.

Ian Matveev, a Russian military analyst and associate of the late Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, said the Kremlin guards information about its losses so jealously to make it easier to hire soldiers for the invasion. If people could easily find out what percentage of contract soldiers survive at the front, he said, it would be extremely difficult to enlist even 30,000 troops per month. By concealing losses, Moscow may also try to impress an external audience — specifically Donald Trump — that Putin's army is on the verge of winning the war, he added.

With each new restriction from the Kremlin, journalists are forced to adjust their methods. 'Russia is big,' Treshchanin said. 'If something gets stifled in one place, it means that, conversely, something else ends up growing elsewhere.'