A fragment of the right hand of Dmitry Donskoy, sent to the front by the Russian Orthodox Church last month, is now the subject of a missing-relic claim that the church calls a fabrication. The military has not commented. No recent photograph from the front has been published, so neither version can be checked.
British intelligence revised its estimate of Russian casualties since February 2022 — killed, wounded and missing — to 1.5 million. General Sir Richard Knighton, chief of the defence staff, said most of those losses had come since January 2023, a period in which Russia has taken about 2 per cent of Ukrainian territory. The Center for Strategic and International Studies put Russian battlefield casualties at up to 450,000 this summer. A February 2026 estimate put Ukrainian military casualties, dead and wounded, at 250,000 to 300,000. In nearly two decades in Vietnam, the United States lost 58,220 dead, with 303,704 wounded and 1,584 missing.
The church’s attempt at a morale lift came on 8 September. The Moscow Patriarchate’s department for the armed forces said a reliquary with part of the relics of Grand Prince Demetrius Donskoy was on its way to the front, “to stand invisibly, in battle formation, alongside our defenders.” The fragment was found last summer during restoration at the Archangel Cathedral in the Kremlin. Donskoy is honoured in Russia for the victory over the Mongols at Kulikovo in 1380. The church declared him a saint in 1988.
On 1 October, the Moscow Times, now based in Amsterdam after being expelled from Moscow, reported that two pro-war Telegram channels had written that retreating troops abandoned the remains. Church spokesman Vakhtang Kipsindze told the state agency RIA Novosti that the reports were a fabrication, spread to harm the church.
Ukraine’s Operation Vivaldi has retaken about 68 square miles around Lyman, in northern Donetsk, and captured 250 Russian soldiers. In a sector under constant drone attack, a report that troops came under fire during a prayer and left the reliquary is at least plausible.
The war the relic was sent to bless has included more than 3,000 attacks on hospitals and other health facilities, more than 3,900 children killed or injured, and, according to the United Nations, the systematic abduction and transfer of thousands of children from Ukraine to Russia and Belarus. If a saint’s hand was meant to inspire an invading army, its loss is an awkward reading.
Source: skai.gr
