Russia’s treatment of its own war casualties has taken a dark and disturbing turn, according to new claims from Ukrainian officials. In a chilling development, Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs announced on 16 June 2025 that Russia has been handing over the bodies of its own soldiers disguised as Ukrainian war dead.
This shocking revelation has sparked outrage and renewed scrutiny over the Kremlin’s wartime strategies — not only on the battlefield, but in its behind-the-scenes propaganda and budgetary manoeuvres.
A Morbid Deception: Passing Off Russian Bodies as Ukrainian
According to Ukrainian authorities, the Russian Federation is deliberately mixing its fallen soldiers with Ukrainian bodies during repatriation efforts. This move appears to serve several cynical objectives.
First, it allows Russia to artificially inflate the number of Ukrainian military casualties, a move designed to sap public morale and pressure Ukrainian leadership.
Second, it disrupts the work of Ukrainian forensic experts, who now face an even greater burden in conducting complex DNA tests to correctly identify the dead. This slows down efforts to return actual Ukrainian soldiers to their families.
Third, and perhaps most disturbingly, it allows the Kremlin to evade financial responsibility. In Russia, if a soldier is officially deemed “missing in action”, the government avoids paying the so-called “coffin money” — death compensation to grieving families. It’s a financial sleight of hand, with dead soldiers literally used to balance the books.
Propaganda Masquerading as Compassion
Meanwhile, Russian state media has painted the repatriation of bodies as a gesture of moral superiority, portraying Moscow as the more “humane” side in the conflict. At the same time, it peddles baseless claims that Ukraine mistreats Russian bodies or refuses to retrieve its own.
These contradictory narratives — compassion on one hand, condemnation on the other — are part of a wider information war designed to control public perception both at home and abroad.
However, multiple investigations have already debunked these fabricated reports, exposing them as part of a broader propaganda strategy meant to whitewash Russia’s own failings and atrocities.
Disposable Even in Death: The Kremlin’s True Priorities
Perhaps the most harrowing aspect of these revelations is what they suggest about how the Kremlin views its own citizens. Russian soldiers, many of them conscripts or mercenaries, are being reduced to “biomaterial” — tools in a cynical game of optics and economics.
Officials suggest this is not an isolated case. A similar pattern was reportedly observed after the infamous Wagner Group mutiny, when the Russian government quickly erased traces of fallen Wagner fighters — burying them without names and bulldozing memorial sites once celebrated as heroic.
These events signal a shift from remembering the dead to deliberately erasing them, as if acknowledging their existence would risk holding the state accountable.
A Regime Built on Denial and Dehumanisation
This approach isn’t just callous — it’s systemic. From denying families the truth about their loved ones, to falsifying the national death toll, the Russian leadership is engaged in a calculated distortion of reality.
Such actions raise profound questions: If bodies are being swapped, how can anyone trust official casualty figures? If names are scrubbed from graves, how can any soldier’s sacrifice be honoured?
This moral decay is not simply a wartime tactic — it’s a reflection of a regime that sees human life as expendable, even in death.
As the war grinds on, it’s clear that the Kremlin’s disregard for its own people is as dangerous as its aggression toward others.
