Yandex Maps blurs new cemetery in Severomorsk
Russia’s online cartographic service has put blurring on 100,000 square metres of land near the Northern Fleet’s headquarters. The move prompts the question whether authorities are trying to hide massive losses in Ukraine.
Yandex Maps has for years blurred sensitive weapons storage sites and military airports on the Kola Peninsula, but limiting public view of a cemetery is a first.
The new cemetery is located 250 metres from the highway between Murmansk and Severomorsk, on an exit shortly after the checkpoint to the closed military town. A short kilometre to the west is the old cemetery, on the west side of the Gryaznaya Bay.
Up to 700 graves have appeared at the site between the summer of 2022 and the summer of 2025. Grounds for several thousand more are already prepared, as seen on the latest (unblurred) Google Earth satellite image from last summer.
The Barents Observer has published multiple articles about the heavy losses of troops from the Russian north, including the Northern Fleet’s units and army units from the Murmansk region. Although many bodies are abandoned on the battlefields, thousands of others are sent back north in coffins.
Russian troop losses in January exceed the number of newly mobilised and contracted soldiers for the second consecutive month, the Kyiv Independent reported last week. Allegedly, Russia recruited 22,000 personnel while Ukrainian officials claimed the losses in January reached 30,618 troops.
Mediazona has by mid-February counted 177,433 confirmed names of Russian soldiers killed. Ukraine's General Staff estimated total Russian casualties for the war at more than 1.2 million, a number that includes those wounded.
None of these numbers could be independently confirmed.
The Kremlin conceals the figures of those who are killed in its war of aggression. Russia’s military losses are officially classified.
Last February, Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office declared the Barents Observer an 'undesirable organisation,' with accusations that have become routine in today’s Putin-era Russia: “discrediting the army.”
It was the Ukrainian X-blogger Necro Mancer who was first to draw attention to the new cemetery inside the closed military administrative–territorial formations (so-called ZATO) near Severomorsk being blurred by Yandex Maps.
The Barents Observer has checked other cemeteries in the Murmansk region without finding similar blurring. Obviously, Russian officials are more concerned about losses within its military ranks than they are about men recruited from villages in the regions who have been killed.
Other military sites in the Murmansk region that are blurred on Yandex Maps include the air bases Severomorsk-1, 2 and 3, Olenya and Monchegorsk. Nuclear warhead facilities like Shchukozero, Okolnaya, Gadziyevo and Ramozero are all blurred, while the site near Zaozersk is still visible.
The top-secret GUGI base in Olenya Bay is not blurred, and two of the mini-submarines for sabotage missions are clearly visible on Yandex Maps. That image, however, is several years old.
