The art of war. The Kremlin is hiding Russia’s death toll in Ukraine—a small regional museum collection helps expose it

In early October 2022, Svetlana Omelyanovich, a journalist with SalskNews, wrote a report on the send-off of volunteers to the war in Ukraine. In the piece, she quoted Andrei Gerusov, draft officer for the Salsk district in the Rostov region: “We are sending volunteers for the fourth time since the special operation began... These are older people who have no combat experience, but their souls are yearning; they go where their hearts tell them. Today, there are five people in the ranks who are going to Ukraine for the second time.” The report mentioned four men by name: Yuri Anikin, Vyacheslav Volokhov, Ruslan Kartiashvili and Alexander Solopov.

Nearly six months later, in late March 2023, Omelyanovich published an article about artists from Salsk who were painting portraits of local residents killed in the war. By that point, all four volunteers mentioned in her send-off report were dead.

“I’m looking into their faces. This guy, I interviewed him before he left; and this man, he had the largest support group,” Omelyanovich wrote. “The third one just stood there silently, hugging his wife and daughter…”

In early 2023, Vasily Shekhovtsov, director of the Salsk Fine Arts Museum, began painting portraits of residents of the Salsk district who had died in Ukraine. He later enlisted other local artists to help with the project, and together they created more than 40 paintings. Among others, they portrayed Vyacheslav Omelyanovich, the journalist's brother-in-law and a special forces soldier. But she did not mention him in the article; he died nine days after it was published.

All the works by the Salsk artists became part of the museum’s collection. They were published in the electronic State Catalogue of the Museum Fund of the Russian Federation and, as a result, have become a highly informative source on the losses suffered by the Russian army in Ukraine. Note that the catalogue’s website is only accessible from inside the country—or with a Russian VPN, so all links to it in this article are archived copies of the actual pages.

“Portrait of a warrior, frontally depicted, painted against the background of a fragment of the Russian flag. The man has a high forehead, his head is bald. The eyes are grey-blue, looking forward and slightly downward. Dark, not thick eyebrows. The nose is small. Lips closed. Ears slightly flattened. Chin round with pronounced near lip folds. The neck is open. Dressed in field military uniform. A strip of a light grey T-shirt is visible on the chest.”

This is the description of the painting “S. V. Pyanov (1975-2023), defender of the Fatherland, participant of the SMO” by Vasily Shekhovtsov. Materials and technique: paper, watercolour, gouache. Size: 39.5 × 29.5 cm. Inventory number: G-1076. Number in the State Catalogue: 47761651.

Mediazona, the BBC’s Russian Service and a group of volunteers have been keeping a list of Russian losses since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in Ukraine. It now contains more than 60,000 names, but Sergei Pyanov, a prisoner who was recruited by Wagner PMC in Rostov’s Penal Colony No. 1 and died in the “Bakhmut meat grinder” on the first anniversary of the war, 24 February 2023, was not on this list until the publication of this article.

When our reporters found the 41 Salsk portraits in the State Catalogue, it turned out that our list of losses only contained information about 36 of them. The names of five KIA soldiers became known thanks to this “museification.”

In addition to Pyanov, there was another prisoner—Yevgeny Medvedev (dog tag k202-115, call sign Cragin), who was recruited from Penal Colony No. 16 in Bashkortostan and died on 28 March 2023. We also learned about the death of Yuri Anikin, one of the volunteers whose send-off to the front was reported by Salsk journalist Svetlana Omelyanovich.

In 12 cases, the State Catalogue revealed the years of birth and death of killed soldiers. For example, we knew from media reports and social media posts that mobilised soldier Alexander Chekhov died on 20 November 2022. The portrait description revealed he was born in 1992 and lived for 30 years.

“Portrait of a tank-man, a warrior,” the museum description reads. “The face is round, framed by a black beard, with a moustache above the lip. The eyes are brown. He seems to be talking, smiling. Mouth open, upper teeth visible. On his head is a helmet. The greyish-white jacket’s collar is unbuttoned, the red ties of the helmet are on his shoulders. Behind him is a landscape, with trees in the distance, a tank, grey sky with blue clouds.”

This means that Chekhov served as a tank-man, which previously also wasn’t public information. Sometimes the Salsk artists portrayed their compatriots in such a way that it is clear from their uniforms or backgrounds which branch of the armed forces they belonged to. Servicemen from the Airborne Troops are most easily identified by their uniforms (blue berets, blue-striped telnyashka undershirts, parachute insignia); there are at least five of them pictured among the Salsk portraits.

“When someone came, you know, they signed all these classified information nondisclosure agreements,” the artist Shekhovtsov explained to Mediazona. “Some asked: ‘Could you paint his house in the background, you know, the one he built before going off to war?’ So I didn’t paint any helicopters and planes there, I painted a house, birds walking, flowers blooming, just like that. But some artists drew appropriate troop indications: parachutes, tanks, whatever you like.”

In an interview with journalist Omelyanovich, Shekhovtsov said that the portraits are painted from photographs taken at the military draft office before soldiers are sent to the front. “The quality of some images leaves much to be desired, but the artists try to recreate the features of the heroes,” Shekhovtsov explained. “If there’s a good photograph, it’s easy to paint. If the photo is blurred, it’s hard. The difficulty is to reproduce the image of a warrior using visual means alone. We consulted a lot with relatives. And we will continue to talk with them, because they can suggest adjustments, and then the portrait will turn out to be as accurate as possible.”

But most of the killed soldiers are depicted without any indication of their specific military roles. “The background is a landscape consisting of two parts. On the left, a symbolic image of a building and an explosion; on the right, a peaceful landscape: a blooming lilac bush, green foliage of trees, blue sky.” This is the description of the portrait of mobilised Private Andrei Denisenko. His year of birth (1982) also became public thanks to the Salsk museum.

Sometimes it was obviously difficult for the artists to depict the troop type, because at least ten of those portrayed were former prisoners. On February 23, 2024, the Salsk district administration reported: “Medals ‘For Bravery’ (posthumously) were awarded to the relatives of Sergei Soyad, Anatoly Anikeev, Dmitry Turbaba, Yevgeny Gannoshenko, Maxim Rudakov, Sergei Pyanov, Mikhail Putilin, Yevgeny Medvedev.”

All those mentioned here were former prisoners who went to war from penal colonies. Mediazona established this with the help of leaked Wagner PMC documents, as well as published verdicts from Russian courts. Overall, ten inmates are depicted in the Salsk portraits. For example, Roman Yevtishenkov was convicted of stealing scrap metal, and Maxim Rudakov was convicted of drug trafficking. Back in September 2022, Rudakov was denied parole by Penal Colony No. 15 in Bataysk, Rostov Oblast.

The fate of Sergei Soyad may have been the most tragic: when he was 20, he beat to death a man rumoured to have gotten his teenage nephew hooked on alcohol. Soyad was sentenced to five years in prison. He had served less than half of his sentence when he was recruited by the Wagner PMC from Ulyanovsk Penal Colony No. 9 (dog tag k103-121, call sign “Agronom”). Sergey Soyad died on October, 25, 2022.

The former inmates were honoured only with posthumous awards and paintings in the museum. But other subjects of the Salsk portraits were memorialised in different ways as well. For six of them, memorial plaques were installed in the schools they attended.

Two men, 29-year-old mobilised soldier Vladislav Ponomarenko and 22-year-old contract serviceman Alexander Tarasenko, were honoured with “hero desks” in the industrial technical school from which they graduated. Such desks, inscribed with information about fallen soldiers, are becoming increasingly popular all over Russia: they are installed right in the classrooms of educational institutions and only the most diligent, high-achieving students get to sit at them.

Two more men, 28-year-old paratrooper Oleg Mikhailichenko and 32-year-old mobilised soldier Maxim Negrya, were included in the “memory book” of the Salsk Cossack Cadet Lyceum. The book was created specifically to keep a record of graduates who died in Ukraine.

“Our team came up with the idea when our graduates started dying,” the lyceum’s director Oleg Basov told Mediazona. “We decided we should immortalise them. We allocated a place in the foyer: portraits of the boys hang on the wall, and below them, under glass, is the book. It has a very nice binding, everything as it should be. Each page is devoted to one of our graduates: his photo, a brief biography, a description of his act of courage, awards and honours he received. We also set up small exhibitions of personal belongings that relatives gave us. There are about eight of them now. Five are already in the memory book, but now, unfortunately, we are working on expanding it, as we have information from fellow soldiers.”

Vasily Shekhovtsov, the director of the Salsk Fine Arts Museum, told Mediazona that the exhibition of paintings has already closed. The portraits are in the museum’s collection, but their number occasionally increases. In July 2024, Shekhovtsov painted his 43rd portrait.

“He graduated from School No. 21 in Salsk, went to Krasnodar and got married there. From there he was drafted and later died. His parents live here, so his father said, ‘Consider him a Salsk resident too.’ I painted him. Yesterday, the father came, took a look at the portrait and said everything was fine,” Shekhovtsov says. “He has a little grey hair, he’s wearing camouflage overalls, and I painted him against the background of the steppe. And the steppe is blooming—we have blue, purple, pink flowers in the steppe—that’s what he’s protecting.”

The name of the man in the new portrait is Alexander Getman. His picture flashed in a report titled “On Victory Day, a monument to our fighters who died during the SMO was unveiled” by Krasnodar’s Kropotkin TV. Some Telegram channels that collect data on Russian losses noticed it. However, at the time this article was published, he was not on our list of losses, as Mediazona’s data department and volunteers have not yet verified the information about his death.

Alexander Getman, as well as Y. V. Anikin, Y. S. Medvedev, A. V. Nistyak, S. V. Pyanov and D. V. Rakov will appear on the list of losses in our next update.

Inforgaphics: David Frenkel

Editor: Mika Golubovsky