Ukraine has another battle on its hands: what to do with rotting bodies of Russian soldiers

While Russia refuses to claim its own, Ukraine readies websites, railway carriages, facial recognition software to help identify the dead.

File photo of Russian troops | Representational image | ANI

New Delhi: With temperatures going up, Ukraine’s landscape has begun to smell from the rotting bodies of dead Russian soldiers.

Vitaly Kim, the governor of the Mykolaiv region in the south – one of the first to be attacked by Russian forces – has requested locals to put the bodies in bags and refrigerate them. “We are not beasts are we,” he appealed to citizens who have lost many of their own, CNN reported.

Russia has not yet given out the exact number of soldiers killed in Ukraine. The official figures so far have remained a little above 500. The Ukraine military has claimed the number could be above 15,000.

The Ukraine government has also said the Russian army was carrying mobile crematoriums to burn their dead.

Ukrainian railways, meanwhile, has provided refrigerated cars to the army to transport the dead to Russia. But Russia is yet to send a request for the repatriation of bodies. “For the sake of ‘victorious’ propaganda, they will deprive mothers of even the opportunity to bury the bodies,” the railways chief shared in a post.

Ukraine continues in its effort to help Russian families identify the dead. The Internal Affairs Ministry has set up a website that “publishes a steady stream of photos of dead soldiers and captured young men, sometimes alongside their identity cards,” CNN reported.

Ukraine is also using facial recognition software to identify the bodies. The technology from a New York-based facial recognition provider finds images on the web that match faces from uploaded photos, according to Reuters.

They are trying to trace social media accounts of dead Russian soldiers and “messaging relatives to make arrangements to collect the body”.

“As a courtesy to the mothers of those soldiers, we are disseminating this information over social media to at least let families know that they they’ve lost their sons and to then enable them to come to collect their bodies,” Ukraine’s vice prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov told Reuters.