Ukraine says Russia is cremating its dead to avoid paying compensation

Ukraine says Russia is allegedly using mobile crematoriums to burn their war dead in a move aimed at avoiding compensation due to the families of the Kremlin’s slain soldiers. 

The information comes from a recent update by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in which the authors noted the lengths the Kremlin is going to hide its losses.

The General Staff reported that the Russians were losing a significant amount of troops daily and were working to hide these losses to deprive families of war compensation. 

“They continue to employ the traditional Russian practice of depriving the families of the dead of the benefits and compensation advertised by Russian propaganda,” the update read according to an English translation from Ukrainska Pravda. 

The update noted that in order to hide these Russian losses “extensive use is being made of mobile crematoria” and gave details about where they were located. 

“In particular, it has been established that one of these crematoria is currently operating 24/7 on the territory of the Berdiansk port,” the General Staff update reported. 

Roughly fifty bodies of recently killed Russian soldiers were being stored at a local morgue awaiting cremation at the crematoria in Berdiansk according to the General Staff report. 

Ukrainska Pravda also reported that the cremation of Russian soldiers was being done without identifying the bodies of the slain servicemen nor were any records being kept. 

News about Russia’s mobile crematoriums has not been independently verified but it is not the first time Moscow has been accused of operating crematoriums to hide its dead. 

One day before Russia invaded Ukraine, the British Ministry of Defence released video footage of a vehicle-mounted crematorium according to a report from The Telegraph. 

Defence Minister Ben Wallace suggested that the mobile crematorium could be used to conceal Russia’s war dead if Vladimir Putin decided to order the invasion of Ukraine. 

Wallace explained that Russia had previously “deployed mobile crematoriums to follow troops around the battlefield, which in anyone's book is chilling.” 

"If I was a soldier and knew that my generals had so little faith in me that they followed me around the battlefield with a mobile crematorium… I'd be deeply, deeply worried,” Wallace added. "It’s a very chilling side effect of how the Russians view their forces.”

Snopes later discovered that the footage shared by the British Ministry of Defence came from a 2013 promotional video for a St. Petersburg-based company called Tourmaline. 

Photo credit: Youtube @zaoTurmalin

Tourmaline built mobile crematoriums for the incineration of biological waste according to Snopes but the fact-checking website couldn’t definitely say Russia wasn’t burning its soldiers. 

Photo credit: Youtube @zaoTurmalin

Since the war began, there have been several reports of Russia’s mobile crematoriums, including some Ukrainian authorities who claimed Moscow was allegedly burning dead civilians to hide evidence of their war crimes in Ukraine. 

Pavlo Kyrylenko is the Military Governor of Donetsk and told CNN in April 2022 Russia was “using mobile crematoriums and mobile cremation machines… taking people out, taking bodies of the dead in the street and the dead from collapsing buildings.”

Whether Russia actually is using mobile crematoriums in Ukraine has yet to be definitely proven and there exists no one piece of concrete evidence supporting the General Staff’s claims; however, that doesn’t mean the proof won’t come along someday.