Russian Army may be hiding true Ukraine death toll by shipping dead soldiers to Siberia

dailystar.co.uk:

Ukraine means that there have been as yet no publicly acknowledged deaths of troops from Moscow. Instead, the worst-hit regions for the heavy losses - held by critics to be “cannon fodder” - are remote from Vladimir Putin’s capital city.

This indicates the political and media elite in Moscow are not personally seeing the increasing flow of coffins returned from a war in which Russia has lost an estimated 17,000 soldiers in five weeks.

A similar pattern relates to St Petersburg, Putin’s birth city, where there is one recorded death, and two captured troops.Moscow has sustained no announced deaths, while ten servicemen from the capital were captured by the Ukrainians.The region immediately surrounding the capital - called Moscow region - has similarly suffered far less fatalities than many places, with two reported dead, and 21 captured.And Leningrad region outside St Petersburg has seen one killed with two captured.Funerals are being held for those slain in the war in many regions - but not in main cities Moscow and St Petersburg, although there is anecdotal evidence of a handful of burials of soldiers whose deaths were not announced.This contrasts sharply with the region of Buryatia, in Siberia, five time zones east of Moscow, where 64 have been reported killed in the war.Many of these are ethnic Buryats rather than Russians.And reports indicate that the true toll here is almost certainly higher, not least because there is a time-lag in the information on the war dead.Pictures of some of the war dead highlight the appalling suffering in Buryatia, a Buddhist republic on the shore of Lake Baikal with a 972,000 population, some 12 times less than the city of Moscow.Available Russian statistics on the war dead are seriously.