GRIST FOR THE nATIONALIST MILL:

Referring to them as "orcs"-- the evil, monstrous army in J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" -- Kim said that the Russians had retreated and left their colleagues' charred bodies behind on the battlefield. He sent CNN pictures of the abandoned corpses, adding: "There are hundreds of them, all over the region."

The governor has called for the bodies to be placed into refrigerators and sent back to Russia for identification through DNA testing. But, a month into the war, it is still unclear how or if the remains of soldiers are being repatriated to Russia, where reports about the death toll have largely been silenced. The country has cracked down on any information about the realities of the bloody war, restricting access to Western media reports, as well as the social networks Twitter and Facebook, in Russian territory.

Exactly how many Russian troops have been killed in Ukraine remains a mystery. The official line from Russia's defense ministry was 498 military personnel until Monday, when pro-Putin Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda published a report updating the toll to 9,861. The figure, which was attributed to the ministry and later retracted by the paper -- which claimed it was hacked -- has not been confirmed by the Kremlin, whose spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Tuesday told CNN: "As far as the numbers are concerned, we agreed from the very beginning that we do not divulge the information."

That number tallies with information shared with CNN by US and NATO officials, who gave a recent estimate that Russian casualties range from between 3,000 and 10,000. Ukrainian officials have claimed the toll is even higher, at more than 15,000. CNN has been unable to verify the overall number of Russian deaths.

One of the most searing, early images of the war in Ukraine was of a dead Russian soldier, his face and body obscured by a dusting of newly fallen snow. The picture, shot 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 to find out any information about their fate.

Tweet   @brothersjudd