Back in the Soviet era, the Kremlin had a simple strategy for dealing with combat casualties in messy foreign wars like the one in Afghanistan: near silence on the subject.
But Russian President Vladimir Putin confronts a more complicated reality as his government grapples with publicly acknowledging military deaths in Ukraine, where tens of thousands of Russian troops seeking to seize control are facing unexpectedly fierce resistance from Ukrainian defenders.
In a social media age, it is difficult for Russian authorities to fully contain and control searing battlefield images flooding the internet: scenes of Russian soldiers’ snow-covered corpses, or plaintive video footage of young Russian POWs saying they had expected to be welcomed as liberators.
