In September, a court in Yaroslavl sentenced a middle-aged man to fourteen years in prison. The basis was that he had photographed the headstones of Russian soldiers who died in the war in Ukraine. According to reports, this is one of the harshest sentences in a series of cases being heard behind closed doors across the country in recent months. The case has become part of a broader practice in which the state suppresses any independent attempts to document and count casualties at the front.
Cemeteries under the control of special services
In recent months, Russian authorities have publicly warned that taking photographs of military graves is punishable by up to life imprisonment. Journalists report that Federal Security Service (FSB) agents are patrolling cemeteries. Since this summer, dozens of people have been arrested across Russia for taking pictures of gravestones, according to correspondents. In closed proceedings, the official charge is usually framed as high treason—specifically, "cooperation with Ukrainian special services," although the details of these cases are not publicly disclosed.
Numbers that don't add up
Because Moscow remains stubbornly silent about the actual casualties on the battlefield, independent journalists and activists are counting the dead using photos of graves and open sources. Mediazona, in collaboration with the Russian service of the BBC, maintains the Russia 200 database, which contains the names of nearly 283,000 fallen soldiers and details about the circumstances of their deaths. Relying on social media posts and local media reports, the editorial team acknowledges that it lacks the resources to document every death. Other organizations cite significantly higher figures: according to the UK Foreign Office and Dutch intelligence, Russian losses exceed half a million soldiers, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated in July that 700,000 Russians had died. For comparison, in September 2022, six months after the start of the full-scale invasion, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu cited a figure of 5,937 deaths, after which virtually no official reports on losses have been released.
From Afghanistan to the "Special Operation"
Even the most modest estimates of Russia's losses significantly exceed the USSR's losses in Afghanistan, where the war lasted for almost ten years beginning in 1979. Media reports indicate that even then, the Kremlin tried to hide the true cost of the conflict: relatives were forced to hold funerals at night, it was forbidden to indicate the place of death on headstones, and the later permitted wording "heroically died while performing an international duty" never replaced the ban on the words "died in Afghanistan." Similar logic, according to experts, is being replicated now: as it became clear that the conflict would be prolonged, Moscow consistently shut down every new channel used by those documenting losses. In April 2024, a Kremlin spokesperson reminded that information on losses is a "state secret" and its disclosure is the "exclusive prerogative of the Ministry of Defense," and later that same year, Rosstat closed access to excess mortality data that had been available since the 1990s.
What researchers say
"More and more graves is likely something that really worries the authorities, as it reminds them of the failure of Putin's war. Too many people have died," stated Jan Behrends of the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History in Germany. Jeff Jones, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, draws a parallel with the Afghan war, recalling how relatives were forced to hide the fact of death at the front. According to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, on November 1, the Russian army lost 2,500 soldiers in a single day—the largest daily figure since the start of the full-scale invasion, which only intensifies the contrast between independent counts and Moscow's official silence.
