Russia imprisons photographers of soldiers' graves to hide Ukraine losses

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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 twisted killers. His crime? Taking photographs of gravestones of Russian soldiers who died in Ukraine.

With the Kremlin coy about battlefield casualty figures, independent journalists and activists have used photography to document the war’s true death toll, revealing losses far greater than Moscow has publicly acknowledged.

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

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

Other organizations estimate the death toll to be significantly higher. The U.K. Foreign Office and Dutch intelligence services estimate Russia’s losses to stand 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.

Relatives of those who died in Afghanistan were forbidden from engraving the place of their loved ones’ deaths on their gravestones. “You could not mark the grave in any way that indicated that the person had died in the war,” Jeff Jones, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, said. “Some [relatives] were actually forced to hold funerals at night so that it wouldn’t draw attention,” he added.

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 wasn’t quite so guarded. In September 2022, six months after the start of Moscow’s full-scale invasion, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said 5,937 Russian soldiers had died in the conflict.

Since then, there have been few official pronouncements about Russian casualties. As its “special military operation” turned into a protracted conflict, Moscow has ramped up efforts to conceal the numbers, shutting down new avenues of investigation for anyone trying to document casualty figures.

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.”

Sergei Shoigu attends the Victory Day military parade in Moscow on May 9, 2022. | Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images

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 as part of liberalization efforts under perestroika and glasnost .

The Rosstat data was an invaluable source for verifying information on casualties — and for refuting government claims, says Dmitry Treshchanin, Mediazona editor and co-author of Russia 200.

“We can count everyone name by name, but someone from government would always say ‘it’s fake,'” Treshchanin 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 uptick in the number of court cases emerging 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.

“It was growing exponentially — it was big news,” Treshchanin said. “You start with 40,000 cases, then four months later you have 70,000, and two months after that, 90,000. I mean, just how many of these people could there possibly be?”

Russia 200 recorded almost 90,000 such cases in 2025 — a more than tenfold increase compared to earlier years of the invasion. “And at some point, they just classified it,” Treshchanin said, referring to the government’s decision to restrict access to these court proceedings at the end of 2025.

As for graveyard photography, Treshchanin and his colleagues are now cautious about using such methods.

“Photos of graves and videos of the funerals were an important source of information for us at the very beginning of the Russian invasion, when not much other info was available,” he explained. But once the Kremlin got wise to the technique, it became too dangerous. “Our volunteers were attacked at the cemeteries,” he explained.

The reason the Kremlin guards information about its losses so jealously is to more easily hire soldiers for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Ian Matveev, a Russian military analyst and an associate of the late Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, said.

“This is a way to deceive potential recruits. If people could easily find out what percentage of contract soldiers survive at the front — or how long a new recruit is likely to last — it would be extremely difficult to enlist even 30,000 troops per month,” Matveev said. By concealing losses, Moscow may also try to impress an “external audience — specifically, at Donald Trump — to convince him 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,” said Treshchanin. “If something gets stifled in one place, it means that, conversely, something else ends up growing elsewhere.”