The Russian brigade blamed for the Bucha killings is now turning on the families of its own dead. The command of the 64th Motorized Rifle Brigade, fighting near Huliaipole in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, is intimidating the wives of missing soldiers who try to learn their fate, the ATESH partisan movement reported.
The brigade is reportedly hiding its dead by calling them missing. The relabeling lets Russia fake a lower death toll while cheating the dead soldiers' families. By logging killed troops as "missing" rather than dead, the 64th Brigade keeps its real losses out of Russia's casualty statistics and out of the compensation system.
Dmitry Shabaev, the commander of the 64th Brigade, systematically ignores the appeals of wives and mothers trying to find their relatives, the partisans claim.
Meanwhile, security services and counterintelligence pressure the women, threatening them with criminal cases for "discrediting" the army and total loss of any payments if they keep searching, according to ATESH.
The command relabels the dead to hide losses
ATESH described the mechanism with a recent example. On 30 May 2026, Ukraine's Defense Forces struck the "Prymorskyi Posad" training ground in occupied Zaporizhzhia Oblast used by the 64th Brigade, and the unit's losses were at least 31 soldiers, 13 of whom the staff promptly wrote off as "missing."
The Kremlin relies on hard commanders like Shabaev, who became brigade commander in 2025 and has already "zeroed out" several rotations of his battalions, ATESH said.
The unit is the same one tied to Bucha
The 64th Brigade carries a specific history. At the start of the full-scale war, it operated in the Bucha district of Kyiv Oblast and is one of the main subjects of the Bucha war-crimes investigations.
That record is documented. Weeks after Ukrainian forces retook Bucha in April 2022 and revealed executed civilians in the streets, Vladimir Putin awarded the 64th Brigade an honorary "Guards" title.
