The bodies of more than 1,500 Russian soldiers have been recovered in the south-eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro, according to a Ukrainian official.
They had been taken to a total of four different morgues, the deputy mayor of the industrial city, Mychajlo Lyssenko, told the US-funded television station Nastoyashcheye Vremya.
He urged Russian mothers to come and collect their dead sons. "I don't want to bury them in mass graves. I don't want to cremate them," Lysenko said. "We are not brutes."
The information could not be independently verified.
According to the Ukrainian army, almost 20,000 Russian soldiers have been killed since the start of the Russian war almost seven weeks ago. Moscow, on the other hand, cites significantly lower losses and most recently named 1,351 dead soldiers from its own ranks.
