BY NICK REYNOLDS ON 2/9/23 AT 4:58 PM EST
Wives of Russian Soldiers Killed in Ukraine Get Fur Coats as
Compensation
Ukrainian military officials said Thursday
that the Russian military is burning its own dead to conceal the scale of
combat losses for the country, further muddying the already unreliable
estimates of Russian casualties so far in the war.
The claim, posted to a Ukrainian military Facebook page,
says Russian forces had set up a mobile crematorium outside of Tokmak, a small
city of about 32,000 people situated on the Molochna River in southeastern
Ukraine.
The city has been under Russian occupation
since last March, and has been subject to repeated offensives by Ukrainian
forces since last summer, including a strike in January that resulted in an
estimated 80 casualties on the Russian side, according to The Kyiv Independent.
The total number of dead is likely to be
obscured, however. Ukrainian military officials reported seeing a mobile
crematorium set up in the city, leaving the dead difficult to account for.
The main indicator, the Ukrainian military
reported, was the smell.
"Locals complain of a constant corpse
stench in the southeastern part of the city, especially at night,"
Ukrainian officials wrote Thursday on Facebook.
Newsweek has contacted the Russian government for
comment.
With bodies burning, it is likely the only
true tally of Russian dead is accounted for by the Russians themselves, and has
remained a closely guarded secret since the start of the war. Ukrainian
estimates are also unreliable, typically tracking higher than the total number
of casualties overall.
In an update on
Thursday, Ukraine's armed forces claimed Russia had lost 910 troops on Wednesday,
bringing the total number of Russian dead since the start of the war to
135,010, including 2,850 over the last three days, after cresting over the
100,000 mark last year.
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back
Meanwhile, Western officials estimate that
Russia is approaching 200,000 casualties—including killed and wounded—since the
war officially commenced on February 24 of last year.
The increasing death
toll comes amid what appears to be increasingly public criticism of the war and its
objectives on Russian state television as levels of Western aid have begun to
increase. The United States recently pledged additional tanks to Ukraine, while
its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has continued a tour of the
country's allies in Western Europe in an effort to secure more aid.
However, Ukraine has
continued to remain under relentless fire from Russian forces in the contested city of Bakhmut, while an assessment
published by the Institute for the Study of War on Wednesday said Moscow is
preparing its "next major offensive" in the Ukrainian region of
Luhansk, which is already largely controlled by Russian forces.
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