A photo of those graves in Rostov-on-Don mentioned earlier.
The "Belarusian Partisan" news site is reporting claims by a Russian blogger in the city of Rostov-on-Don that he has discovered dozens of fresh graves in the city's municipal cemetery.
The blogger, Andrei Palych, wrote on the LiveJournal social networking site that he noticed the gravesites while visiting the grave of his father, who died last year and was buried in a section of the cemetery overlooking the Suvorov military housing complex.
Palych said the road to his father's plot had narrowed considerably and was now surrounded by a number of fresh graves, each marked with a small, handwritten sign. "Almost all the graves are marked with the suffix 'NM' or 'NZh'" -- the Russian abbreviation for "unknown man" and "unknown woman" -- "but there are also some with names and surnames," Palych wrote.
"Most of the graves' dates of death are from the summer and autumn of this year, although there are some also listed as being in 2013 and 2012. But you can see that the graves were all made at the same time... The majority are listed as being between 20-30 years old, 40-45. Almost all of them were under 60."
The blog item, which includes multiple photographs of the fresh graves, has prompted speculation that Russian soldiers killed in the war in Ukraine have been buried in the Rostov cemetery. Palych's LiveJournal post has sparked more than 1,000 comments.
The latest allegation follows reports last week that Russian paratroopers killed in Ukraine were secretly buried in Russia's Golden Ring city of Kostroma. The Kremlin has come under increasing criticism, particularly from soldiers' families, for failing to provide transparent information about how many Russian soldiers have deployed in Ukraine, and how many have been killed.
From AFP:
Western allies should learn in the next few days if their punishing sanctions on Russia have softened its stance on Ukraine enough to justify lifting the drag on Europe's increasingly fragile economic recovery.
Recent signals from Moscow have been encouraging.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday ordered 17,600 troops performing drills near the Ukrainian border back to their bases. And the number of weekend attacks by pro-Kremlin insurgents in the former Soviet state's separatist east sharply fell.
Firmer confirmation of a rapprochement may come on Tuesday in Paris when U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry confronts Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
But the final answer may only emerge after a likely meeting in Milan on Friday between Putin and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko -- their third since Kyiv's switch of allegiance this year from Moscow to the West.
"I am not expecting these negotiations to be easy," Poroshenko said on Saturday. "But I am an optimist."
At stake will be the fate of a shaky Ukrainian truce deal that -- after the loss of 3,400 lives -- has calmed some fighting but failed to thwart rebel plans to hold their own elections on November 2.
Hanging in the balance are the punitive EU and U.S. restrictions on Russia that have prompted a sort of trade war and contributed to Germany's biggest drop in exports since the global financial crisis of 2009.