the impossible count of Russian soldiers killed on the front

It’s a secret number, impossible to confirm. On a Ukrainian site, every day the new faces of Russian soldiers, presented as combat dead, are displayed. Hundreds and hundreds of soldiers. A macabre countdown and shocking videos. A little everywhere in Ukraine, these same scenes of bodies of Russian soldiers, for example lined up in a train from Odessa. For kyiv, 15,000 enemy soldiers would have been killed, that is to say the equivalent in one month of ten years of Russian war in Afghanistan.

The United States estimates this figure at 7,000, Moscow recognizes only 1,351 deaths. Last week, a Russian newspaper gave the figure of 9,861 dead Russian soldiers, before withdrawing the article urgently. To counter the Kremlin in this war of numbers, Ukraine has equipped itself with a new weapon, facial recognition. It is an American company that must compare the images of dead soldiers with a database of billions of profiles. But using this American technology, contested in several countries, is not without risk, believes a specialist.