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

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.” In recent months, Russian authorities have issued warnings that taking photographs of military graves could result in life imprisonment, while the Federal Security Service has patrolled the country’s cemeteries in search of offenders. Since the summer, several dozen people across Russia have been arrested.