Russian troops fought alongside the decomposing corpse of a comrade for weeks. Ukraine's soldiers 'genuinely shocked' at how enemy treats their dead, report says.

• The bodies of Russian soldiers are being left behind in Ukraine as Moscow denies the true death toll.
• In one case, a soldier had to fight beside a decomposing corpse for weeks before being killed himself.

Since the early days of the war in Ukraine, there have been reports of the bodies of Russian soldiers being left behind as Moscow refuses to acknowledge the true death toll.

And in one case, Russian troops were forced to fight alongside the decomposing corpse of their dead comrade for weeks, a Ukrainian soldier told The Times of London.

One Ukrainian soldier showed the paper two gruesome images of recently captured Russian trenches.

The first image was of a fresh Russian corpse; the other was of an older corpse reduced to a skeleton about a hundred yards away.

This likely meant that the recently killed soldier had been fighting alongside the decomposing corpse of his comrade for weeks.

Ukrainian soldiers are "genuinely shocked" at how differently Russia treats their dead compared with how they treat their own, with scores of injured and dead Russian soldiers being abandoned on the battlefield, The Times reported.

The number of Russian soldiers that have died in Ukraine is one of Moscow's most closely guarded secrets.

A recent analysis said there had been nearly 50,000 Russian casualties, according to independent Russian media outlets Mediazona and Meduza.

Ukraine said it offered to return the bodies of thousands of dead soldiers to Russia to be buried, but Moscow refused because it did not want to acknowledge they had died.

Ukraine's casualty rate is also a similarly closely guarded secret, with the official position being that three Russians are dying for every Ukrainian.

However, Ukrainian soldiers privately say this is a cautious estimate and that the real ratio is much more in Ukraine's favor, per The Times.

The outlet reproted that superior frontline medical care for the wounded at field hospitals is helping Ukraine minimize its losses.