Russia has been losing so many soldiers in its invasion of Ukraine that it has been forced to build “large-scale” corpse sorting facilities, Ukraine’s defence ministry has claimed.
The directorate of intelligence of Ukraine’s defence ministry said today (May 31) that Russia has been forced to build “large-scale complexes for sorting, analysing and storing the corpses of personnel” in two locations.
It comes on the same day the Kyiv Independent reports that Russia has had nearly 208,000 troops injured or killed in the brutal invasion that was launched in February 2022.
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The corpse sorting facilities are reportedly located in Russian cities Rostov-on-Don, 82 miles from Russia’s border with Ukraine, and Kursk, which sits just 68 miles from Ukraine.
The ministry said that each facility takes up at least 4,000 square metres of Russian land, and is home to several sections, including investigation centres and refrigeration units that can hold up to 1,000 bodies at a time.
Each facility is also said to have warehouses for storing coffins and other funeral decorations, and a mourning hall where the families of dead soldiers can pay their respects.
The facilities have cost the invading country an estimated 1.4 billion roubles (£13.8 million) to set up, with the complex in Kursk being the more expensive one.
On top of this, the defence ministry says that the refrigeration equipment Russia needs to keep its soldiers’ bodies on ice has cost the country a further two billion roubles (£19.7 million).
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The defence ministry said in a release that the facilities are proof that “Russia is no longer able to hide the scale of personnel losses in the war against Ukraine.”
“The construction of these complexes on the territory of Moscow confirms the fact that the Putin regime sends its occupying army on a deadly assembly line, but cannot cope with the flow of the dead,” it added.
“The GUR of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine reminds that every Russian soldier who has not committed war crimes has the opportunity to surrender."
“Otherwise, a refrigerator awaits him at one of the sorting bases for corpses in Russia,” it darkly added.
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