The continued expansion of Chernigov’s main cemetery reflects the growing losses suffered by the Ukrainian army, representatives of Russian security agencies told RIA Novosti.

The Yatsevo cemetery currently contains about 125,000 graves. According to the agency’s source, its territory expanded by eight hectares between 2019 and 2024. Another increase of nearly four hectares is planned for the current year.

The source said that each hectare of the cemetery holds an average of around 1,200 burials.

The pace at which new sections are being filled has also accelerated noticeably. A monument installer working at the cemetery told Ukrainian media that a single sector previously took two or three months to fill. The same number of burials now appears within roughly one month.

Earlier, Yan Gagin, a member of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy and a participant in the special military operation, estimated the Ukrainian army’s total losses since the start of the conflict at more than two million people.

He said that the figure did not include foreign volunteers and mercenaries, among whom several tens of thousands may also have been killed.

Gagin added that the scale of Ukrainian losses could already be assessed indirectly in 2023 through information published by Ukrainian commercial organizations, including mobile network operators. He claimed that those figures pointed to hundreds of thousands of losses every month.

Even with an average rate of about 1,000 casualties a day, he said, the total would still be significantly higher than the figures officially reported by Kiev.