Editor's note:
The following article contains explicit images.
Lviv, Ukraine (CNN) --
The first warm, sunny days of spring in the southern Mykolaiv region give way to a grim new reality: the smell of death.
As the ice melts and the ground thaws, the bodies of Russian soldiers scattered across the landscape are becoming a problem.
In his late-night video address Saturday, Vitaly Kim, the region's governor, called on local residents to help collect the bodies and bag them as temperatures rise above freezing.
“We are not beasts, are we?” he implored the residents, who have already lost many of their own in this war.
Mykolaiv was one of the first regional capitals to be attacked after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine on February 24.
After penetrating the urban center, the Russian troops have been forced to withdraw by the Ukrainian military, leaving a trail of blackened combat vehicles and tanks in their wake.
But the battle for the city, a cornerstone of Russia's quest westward along the Black Sea coast to Odessa, remains intense and it is unclear how long Ukrainian forces will be able to stand up to the siege.
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A burned out Russian combat vehicle, with the letter Z emblazoned on its door, east of the city of Mykolaiv on March 10.
Referring to them as "orcs," the evil and monstrous army from JRR Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," Kim said the Russians had retreated, leaving the charred bodies of their comrades on the battlefield.
He sent CNN photos of the abandoned bodies, adding: "There are hundreds of them, all over the region."
The governor called for the bodies to be placed in refrigerators and sent to Russia for identification through DNA testing.
However, after a month of war, it remains unclear whether the soldiers' remains are being repatriated to Russia, where reports of the death toll have been largely muted.
The country has clamped down on any information about the reality of the bloody war, restricting access to Western media reports, as well as social networks Twitter and Facebook, on Russian soil.
The exact number of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine remains a mystery.
The official figure from the Russian Defense Ministry was 498 soldiers until before Monday, when the Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, proPutin, published a report that updated the figure to 9,861.
The figure, which was attributed to the Ministry and later retracted by the newspaper, which claimed it had been hacked, has not been confirmed by the Kremlin, whose spokesman Dmitry Peskov told CNN on Tuesday: "As for the figures, we agreed from the beginning that we would not disclose that information.
That figure matches information shared with CNN by US and NATO officials, who gave a recent estimate that Russian casualties range from 3,000 to 10,000.
Ukrainian officials have claimed that the number of victims is even higher, more than 15,000.
CNN has not been able to verify the total number of deaths of Russian soldiers.
One of the most shocking early images of the war in Ukraine was that of a dead Russian soldier, his face and body hidden by a layer of freshly fallen snow.
The image, taken by New York Times photojournalist Tyler Hicks, captured the anonymity of the more than 150,000 Russians sent to fight their neighbors, and the anxiety of Russian families, desperate for any information about their fate.
Snow covers the body of a dead Russian soldier near a road outside Kharkiv, Ukraine, a day after the invasion began.
Credit: Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
The Ukrainian government claims that the Russian Army sent mobile crematoria to cremate its own dead.
"The Russians who die here, nobody counts them, the people who die in this war. Do they know that they have brought a crematorium oven with them? They are not going to show the bodies to their families. They are not going to tell the mothers that their children died here," Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky told reporters at a March 3 briefing.
On the same day, Ukrzaliznytsia, the state-owned Ukrainian railway company, said in a statement on its website that it had provided Ukraine's armed forces with 20 refrigerated wagons for the removal of dead Russian soldiers from various areas, including Odessa.
Just 72 hours later, the president of Ukrzaliznytsia posted a message on his personal Telegram channel in which he said that Russia never got to load them.
"For the sake of 'victorious' propaganda, they are ready to deprive mothers of even the opportunity to bury the bodies," wrote Oleksandr Kamyshin.
Some 6,000 Russian soldiers may have been killed in Ukraine so far, according to a US official.
The Ukrainian government said it is still waiting to receive a request from the Russian authorities for the repatriation of the bodies of the dead.
Ukraine's deputy prime minister said that the issue of collecting and identifying the bodies had been discussed at a meeting between Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal and Peter Maurer, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). ) Thursday.
But the ICRC has not confirmed whether it is assisting Ukraine in returning Russian human remains to their country of origin, a situation provided for under international law.
Hints about the magnitude of the Russian Army's losses have begun to emerge in videos and reports.
On March 18, the Belarusian service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a US-funded media outlet, released footage of Russian ambulance convoys appearing to arrive at field hospitals in southern Belarus, near the border with Ukraine, and reported that morgues in the area were overwhelmed.
A March 21 report by the English-language Ukrainian media outlet The Kyiv Independent followed a Ukrainian emergency unit unearthing Russian soldiers from unmarked mass graves in Rusaniv, a town east of the capital, left in a pile, without identification documents.
The abandoned body of a Russian soldier lies on a road in Sytniaky, Ukraine, on March 5.
Russian state media have stuck to the 498 figure and few funerals have been documented in the country, where war censorship has been taken to the extreme with a new law criminalizing reporting that contradicts the Kremlin.
In the absence of information about the Russian dead, the Ukrainians have tried to fill in the gaps.
"He said he was on his way to Kyiv": Russian families turn to Ukrainian hotline in desperate search for missing soldiers
A website and Telegram channel created by the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs, aimed at Russian families, publishes a constant stream of photos of dead soldiers and captured youths, sometimes alongside their identity documents.
The name of the site, 200rf.com, is a grim nod to Gruz-200, or Cargo-200, a military code word that came into use in the 1980s during the war in Afghanistan, used by the Soviets to refer to the bodies of soldiers placed in zinc-lined coffins for transportation.
Viktor Andrusiv, adviser to the Ukrainian Interior Minister and creator and coordinator of the channel, also known as "Look for Your Own," said he launched the initiative to help Russian families locate information about their soldiers. .
"We are not waging war against the Russian people. And I don't think they should suffer because of their regime, which lies to them and tells them that everything is fine, that no one is dying," he told CNN.
"It's a way of bringing them some truth."
But identifying the dead Russian soldiers has been a difficult task.
Andrusiv said only 30 have been found on the Telegram channel by their relatives, who are sifting through the horrific footage of those killed in action for clues as to whether their loved ones are dead or alive.
Ukrainian forces send Andrusov pictures of abandoned bodies, but they are often unrecognizable and carry no identification papers.
"It is very difficult to identify the dead because they normally do not carry documents, normally the commanders take their documents and put them in some boxes. Normally they die in the fire, in the bombardments. And the plates where their number is written cannot be identified. , it doesn't give us any information about who the person is," Andrusiv said.
And as March turns into April, and temperatures rise to around 15°C, the problem gets worse.
"The problem of Russian corpses is really huge. There are thousands of them. Before the war, the weather was cold, it was fine, but now we have problems because the Russians don't want to take the bodies away," Andrusiv said.
"In fact, I don't know what we will do in the next few weeks with their bodies."
-- Oleksandra Ochman contributed to this report.