Russia has massively increased state spending to construct new cemeteries since launching a full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine more than two years ago, according to analysis by an independent Russian publication.
Last year, Russian authorities spent more than 225 million rubles ($2.5 million) on cemetery expansion projects, which is twice as much as in 2022 and almost six times more than in 2020, data from Russia's official state procurement portal showed, The Moscow Times reported on July 19.
By June this year, 136 million rubles ($1.5 million) had already been spent on cemetery expansion, the publication said.
Newsweek has contacted Russia's Foreign Ministry for comment by email.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which was launched in February 2022, has resulted in high numbers of military fatalities for both Moscow and Kyiv.
While it isn't possible to independently verify the true scale of Russia's battlefield losses, and official statistics don't reflect a surge in deaths caused by the ongoing war, analysis of publicly available data suggests death tolls far higher than what is being relayed to the public.
On June 27, independent outlet Important Stories used data from the Federal State Statistics Service of Russia (Rosstat) to estimate that at least 71,000 Russian troops had died since the war began.
Independent Russian news outlets Mediazona and Meduza also published a joint-investigation on troop deaths on July 5, using data from the country's National Probate Registry. The outlets found that by the end of June, approximately 120,000 Russian troops had died since the conflict began, "but the real number could be as high as 140,000."
The British Ministry of Defence said on May 31 that Moscow had likely suffered more than 500,000 military dead and wounded since early 2022.
Moscow rarely shares information on the number of casualties it has sustained in the war, and hasn't touched on the subject since September 2022, when former Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that just under 6,000 troops had been killed.
In a rare statement on losses in the Ukraine war, Putin said at a press conference on June 5 that the ratio of "irretrievable losses" between Russia and Ukraine was one to five in favor of Moscow, but didn't elaborate on the figures.
Kyiv similarly shies away from providing updated figures on its battlefield losses. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in February that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in the war.
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