Vladimir Putin is allegedly intimidating Russian widows and mothers to stop them retrieving the bodies of soldiers who died in his invasion of Ukraine.
Putin's forces has suffered heavy losses during the 86 days of fighting since the invasion began.
It is widely believed that tens of thousands of Russians have died fighting in Ukraine.
Advisor to the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, Vadym Denysenko, says Russian families haven’t collected the bodies of dead loved ones out of “fear” of the authorities.
He said Putin’s government was “intimidating relatives of the dead and missing”.
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They had allegedly told grieving families that they would not receive state compensation for the deaths of their loved ones if they retrieved the bodies from the Ukrainian authorities.
This “stops mothers, wives, children from going to the territory of Ukraine and to take the bodies of their dead”, said Denysenko.
“This is probably also the first case in the history of mankind when wives, mothers and children of Russian servicemen, choosing between possible compensation and fear of the Russian authorities and the opportunity to bury their child or husband, choose the former.”
Alongside that, he claimed that Russia was refusing to take back any of its dead, with bodies piling up in Ukraine.
Vadym added: “We can only say that this is probably the first war in the history of mankind when one country refuses to take the bodies of its dead.”
The Russian corpses that Ukraine has retrieved from the battlefield are kept in refrigerated train carriages.
But it is suspected that Putin is in no rush for them to return home because a flood of dead bodies would highlight the true death toll of the war.
“We appeal to the mothers, relatives, and friends of those soldiers who died on Ukrainian territory to come, identify and collect the bodies of their relatives,” Vadym said.
Ukraine also highlighted how it had search teams which collected the bodies of Russian invaders and, where possible, identified and tagged them.
In a report, Army Inform, the information agency of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine, said: "We receive information about such burials and simply abandoned bodies in the liberated areas of Kharkiv region primarily from our military.”
Information about the dead Russian soldiers left behind by their commanders often came from the local residents who survived the occupation.
The report said: “Having discovered a number of graves of destroyed Russian servicemen, we deliver their remains to refrigerated wagons only after a certain period.”
There have been reports of Russian commanders shooting dead their wounded, rather than retrieving them for medical help.
This comes as the Russian invasion of Ukraine comes towards the end of its third month of fighting, since beginning on February 24.
Estimate vary, with Ukraine claiming Moscow has lost in excess of 24,000 troops, but most calculations but the upper end of the Kremlin's losses around 20,000 dead.
