The management said that the Russian “occupation administration” of Melitopolis is now urgently trying to procure more freezers and industrial refrigerators to store its dead, because the meat packing plant can not accommodate extra bodies. Russia’s alleged efforts to find adequate storage space for the overwhelming death toll came as Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on Thursday ordering more than 134,000 new conscripts. While the Russian Defense Ministry denied that the conscripts had been recruited for the Russia-Ukraine war, although it acknowledged in March that some conscripts had taken part in the attack, Ukraine’s report suggests that Russia may face high manpower losses. Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said in a Facebook post on Wednesday that some 31,500 Russian soldiers had been killed in the war. Russia, meanwhile, has largely avoided providing updates on its military casualties. Russia has turned a meat-packing plant in the occupied Ukrainian city of Melitopol into a morgue now “completely filled” with the bodies of slain Russian soldiers, according to a report released Thursday by Ukraine’s Defense Ministry. Above, Russian soldiers patrol a street in Melitopolis on May 1, 2022. Andrey Borodulin / AFP via Getty Images The country last published the death toll on March 25, saying 1,351 Russian soldiers and officers had been killed in Ukraine, Radio Free Europe reported. Another Ukrainian government agency claimed that Russia was trying to cover up the full extent of its military losses in the war. Ukraine’s security service said last month that it had intercepted calls from Russian soldiers who said the dead soldiers were “missing” and that their bodies were hidden in huge “dumps”. The report from the Ukrainian intelligence service claimed that the storage of corpses in Melitopol, located in the Zaporizhia region, was another attempt by the Russian leadership to conceal the true extent of its losses in Ukraine. He described a specific case on June 6 when the Russian military visited a facility in the occupied city and inspected its cold rooms. “The equipment was found suitable for conversion into a morgue,” the report said, according to an English translation. The management of the company was informed about the “decision to use them temporarily free of charge for the preservation of the bodies of the fallen soldiers”. The administration said more bodies of Russian soldiers killed during fighting near the other Ukrainian cities of Polohy and Huliaipole, also in the Zaporizhzhia region, were being transported to Melitopol. “These events are associated with large losses of the occupiers in human resources,” the report added. In the Zaporizhzhia region of southeastern Ukraine, Russian forces are focusing on ground and artillery attacks near its border with the Donetsk region, according to an assessment by the Institute for War Studies on June 8. Newsweek contacted the Ministries of Defense of Russia and Ukraine for comment.
