The Kremlin can hide the death toll. It can’t hide the graves.

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In September, a Russian court condemned a middle-aged man in Yaroslavl to 14 years in a penal colony — a sentence usually reserved for the country’s most twisted killers. His crime? Taking photographs of gravestones of Russian soldiers who died in Ukraine. With the Kremlin coy about battlefield casualty figures, independent journalists and activists have used photography to document the war’s true death toll, revealing losses far greater than Moscow has publicly acknowledged. “The multiplying number of graves — that must be a sight that’s bothering the authorities very much because it reminds them of the failure of Putin’s war,” Jan C. Behrends of the German-based Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History said. “So many people have died.