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Russia Labels Dead Troops "Missing" to Conceal Battlefield Losses
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Russia's 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade, known for its participation in the Butcha massacre, now deployed near Huliaipole in Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia region, is systematically recording its killed soldiers as missing in action while intimidating their families into silence, according to the partisan movement ATESH
The claims were published on the movement's Telegram channel on August 4.
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ATESH stated that thousands of servicemen in the brigade, a formation designated military unit 51460, have been logged as missing. The movement alleged that its commander, Dmitry Shabaev, routinely ignores the appeals, inquiries, and protests of wives and mothers trying to learn the fate of their relatives.
Reclassifying the dead as missing is used to distort the true scale of the unit's losses, the group claimed.
Families who press for answers are threatened directly, ATESH added, with security and counterintelligence officers warning them of criminal cases for "discrediting" the army and the loss of all payments should they keep searching.
The movement summarized the message conveyed to relatives as a blunt threat: "If you keep searching, we will imprison you."
As a recent example, ATESH pointed to a Ukrainian strike on May 30, 2026, against the Primorskyi Posad training ground in the temporarily occupied part of Zaporizhzhia region, a site used by the brigade.
The movement claimed the strike killed at least 31 of the unit's personnel, 13 of whom the headquarters promptly logged as missing rather than dead.
According to ATESH, Shabaev took command in 2025 and has already burned through the full complements of several of his combat battalions. The Kremlin, it alleged, deliberately relies on hardline commanders of his kind.
The brigade also carries a documented past: early in the full-scale war, it operated in the Bucha district of Kyiv region, where it became one of the main formations named in war crimes investigations.
The movement noted that it continues to compile data on commanders it holds responsible for hiding losses and pressuring servicemen's relatives. I
The concealment of Russian military losses has become a recurring pattern across the war. In one recent case, Ukraine recovered the remains of 501 people that Moscow claimed were Ukrainian soldiers, part of a practice widely seen as a way for Russia to obscure its own dead and avoid paying compensation to their families.
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