In Belarusian Morgues and Hospitals, Clues to Russian Military Losses in Ukraine

There’s no room in the morgue at Mazyr. It’s filled with the bodies of Russian soldiers.

At one hospital in this Belarusian city about 60 kilometers from the border with Ukraine, the hallways and wards are filled with the sounds of soldiers moaning from their battlefield wounds.

At the main train station, Russian soldiers have been recorded on video ferrying stretchers — apparently holding wounded servicemen — from a military ambulance to a waiting train operated by Russia’s state railway company.

And in Naroulya, a town still closer to the Ukrainian border, residents report that a Russian field hospital has been set up in a former motor depot, and wounded Russian soldiers are being flown in from Ukraine, treated briefly, then shipped on to Mazyr and the regional capital, Homel.

Now in its fourth week, Russia’s war in Ukraine continues to extract a horrific toll on Ukrainian civilians and soldiers on both sides. Some of the deadliest attacks and fighting have happened near the Belarusian border close to Homel; near the Russian border in Kharkiv and Sumy in the east; and around southern port cities such as Mariupol and Kherson.

Full and reliable casualty counts have been hard to come by. Among civilians, the United Nations has recorded 780 killed and more than 1,250 wounded — but it estimates that the actual figures are much higher, and Ukrainian officials say thousands of civilians have been killed.

The toll among combatants has also proved elusive, with experts saying each side seeks to exaggerate the losses of the enemy and minimize its own.

In Russia, coming up with an accurate tally is even harder, due to government regulations that have clamped down on independent reporting–and even made uttering the words “war” and “invasion” a potentially criminal offense.

But in the Belarusian regions bordering Ukraine, residents and medical workers have reported a rising tide of corpses and maimed servicemen being shipped out of Ukraine and then sent elsewhere for further treatment — or burial.

More than 2,500 soldiers’ corpses had already been shipped from the Homel region back to Russia by trains or by plane as of March 13, according to one employee of the Homel regional clinical hospital.

Like all the people who spoke with RFE/RL, this individual asked not to be named out of fear of retribution or prosecution by Belarusian or Russian security agencies.

The figure could not be independently verified.

Ukraine’s military claims that more than 14,000 Russians have been killed since Russia launched the invasion on February 24 –a number that is much higher than most independent estimates. The military has not released formal casualty figures, saying it is a state secret, but President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said last week that about 1,300 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed.

Russia’s Defense Ministry, meanwhile, claims that more than 2,870 Ukrainians soldiers and paramilitary fighters have been killed, and around 3,700 wounded. Its only official tally of Russian casualties came on March 2, when the ministry said that 498 soldiers had been killed and 1,597 wounded.

Earlier this week, U.S. intelligence put the Russian military death toll at more than 7,000 — and said that is a conservative estimate.