At least 165 graves of Russian soldiers have been uncovered in the Arctic city of Murmansk, a significantly higher death figure than local authorities have publicly acknowledged, opposition activist Violetta Grudina said Wednesday.
Grudina, an exiled former regional coordinator for Alexei Navalny’s now-banned political network, said the graves were found in a separate section of the Murmansk municipal cemetery, with some freshly dug graves still awaiting burials.
“The names of the deceased match those in the authorities’ official reports, but the number of graves is far higher,” she wrote on Telegram.
The activist told the independent 7x7 news outlet that Murmansk region Governor Andrei Chibis has so far confirmed the deaths of only 40 soldiers from the region since the start of the war. However, Grudina said Chibis stopped updating the official military death toll earlier this year and even deleted his previous social media posts offering condolences to soldiers’ families.
Grudina shared 10 photographs showing rows of graves marked with Russian flags, wreaths and military emblems. She noted that the 165 graves she documented did not account for burials in other cemeteries across the wider Murmansk region.
An independent media tally based on open-source information estimates that 317 soldiers from Murmansk have died in Ukraine since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
Overall, Russia’s estimated military death toll has reached nearly 62,000, though the Russian Defense Ministry stopped releasing official figures on its troop losses in September 2022.
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