The figure gives an insight into the potential scale of Russian military losses. Moscow has received some 48,000 requests for DNA tests from family members of soldiers fighting in Ukraine and searching for a relative, Astra, an independent media outlet, reported.
He broadcast on Telegram on Tuesday evening a video of a November 26 meeting of a committee of the Duma (lower house of Parliament) on aid to veterans and their families.
During this meeting, a Deputy Minister of Defense, Anna Tsiviliova, presented by some media as a relative of Vladimir Putin, explains that the Russian authorities have received tens of thousands of requests for DNA tests from relatives of soldiers. .
Many soldiers “found”, dead or alive
“The Ministry of the Interior collects them, free of charge, at its own expense, and includes them in its database, from all family members who have requested them. Like I said, 48,000 people,” she says in this video.
After this statement, during this meeting, the head of the Duma Committee on Defense, Andrei Kartapolov, spoke, asking that “this number not appear anywhere” in official documents, because it is “confidential and fairly sensitive information”.
Anna Tsiviliova then specifies that this data does not reflect the number of soldiers “missing”, because “many have been found”, without specifying the number of missing, those identified post-mortem and those found alive.
A “state secret”
The invasion of Ukraine is very deadly for the troops of kyiv and the Kremlin. The latter, more numerous, regularly carry out frontal attacks, mainly on the eastern front, very costly in human lives.
The Kremlin invoked “the law on state secrets” and “the special regime” to justify the lack of official communication on military losses. At the beginning of June 2024, President Vladimir Putin refused to quantify them.
The independent Russian site Mediazona and the BBC Russian service nevertheless put forward the figure of 80,873 Russian soldiers killed since the start of the invasion. According to the British media, casualties among volunteer soldiers continue to rise rapidly, with many dying within two to four weeks of being sent to the front.
This count, which is not exhaustive, comes from the use of public information, such as official press releases, media obituaries, death announcements and observation of graves in Russian cemeteries.
