BBC Newsnight has been mapping the cost - in men and machinery - for Russia's 'elite' 331st regiment
Each time casualty replacements - including the conscripts shown on TV in November - are brought in to replace losses, the original cadre of soldiers gets smaller, and the overall size of the unit diminishes. It may now number no more than 300-400 at the front.
There's a trend seen in a few Russian garrison towns, for wives and mothers to post pictures of themselves with an absent soldier's uniform. One tearful mother of a dead paratrooper from the 331st remembers the Great Patriotic War, and adds, "I hope there will be stories written about our guys".Those questioning the sacrifice tend to get short shrift.
Initially, when the 331st was part of an Airborne Forces task force pushing towards Kyiv, we had difficulty identifying its vehicles in video of the fighting. A painted "V" was used to identify units from all of the various units in that task force, and an inverted triangle symbol with a "3" in the centre was also used by one other regiment apart from the 331st.
Open source analysts have also identified at least 25 destroyed BMDs marked in this way, by combing Ukrainian military social media accounts. As with the dead soldiers, this visible loss does not represent the total, since many other BMDs belonging to the Kostroma regiment have likely been lost outside the view of Ukrainian troops.
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