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Russia’s massive COVID-19 deaths may help Putin hide Ukrainian war losses

byPaul A. Goble
27/02/2022
2 minute read
Russian equipment, soldiers and KIA bodies in Ukraine. Image: social media
Image: social media
Russia’s massive COVID-19 deaths may help Putin hide Ukrainian war losses
On February 26, 2022, two days after Russia launched an all-out attack on Ukraine, a Ukrainian minister stated that Ukraine is forced to seek help from the International Organization of the Red Cross, so it organizes the removal of the bodies of Russian military killed in Ukraine. According to Minister for the Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories of Ukraine Irina Vereshchuk, thousands of dead Russian servicemen are on the territory of Ukraine, and Russia is in no hurry to return its dead to their families.
Even before Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost, Soviet citizens knew something about the losses their military was taking in the Soviet-Afghan War by the number of graves dug in local cemeteries. And even when Moscow low-balled the “official” figures, the people knew something closer to the truth from their own experience with funerals. That pattern has continued in post-Soviet Russia with the powers that be consistently reporting low losses and the people realizing that the actual number of casualties must be far higher because the corpses are being sent back to their home areas of burial – and some observers are keeping track and summing these up. But Vladimir Putin
may have one great advantage in dealing with losses from his invasion of Ukraine: the number of Russians who died during the second pandemic year exceeded 2.4 million; and it will be relatively easier to obscure the number lost in the fighting in Ukraine. That is especially true because many funeral operators are running far behind in putting up monuments, and so it is entirely possible that it won’t be easy for the public to factor out deaths from combat (Kommersant.ru and Finanz.ru).

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