Did Russia Accidentally Admit the True Russian Soldier Death Count? – Russian tabloid newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda this week published and then quickly removed a report claiming that the Russian Ministry of Defense had recorded the deaths of 9,861 Russian troops since the invasion of Ukraine began on February 24.
“According to the Russian Defense Ministry, during the special operation in Ukraine, the Russian Armed Forces lost 9861 people killed and 16153 wounded,” the report said, before being abruptly pulled from the internet.
CNN journalists analyzed HTML code from the website which revealed the post was first made on Monday at 1:09am Moscow time. According to the same code, the article was edited at around 9:56 pm Moscow time, only seconds after CNN reporters accessed the report. All references to the death count of Russian troops were removed from the site.
A statement was published by the outlet after the edits were made, claiming that the website had been hacked and that a “fake insert was made into a publication.”
Why It’s Significant
The reason this story was so widely shared is that Russia has gone to great lengths to hide the true number of troops who died in combat in Ukraine.
Russia last published an official estimate of deaths on March 2. At the time, Russia claimed that just 498 troops had been killed and 1,597 injured. At the same time, Russia also claimed that 2,870 Ukrainian soldiers and “nationalist” fighters had been killed by Russian forces and that 3,700 were founded.
The figure published on Komsomolskaya Pravda appears to be accurate – at least when compared to official estimates released by Western intelligence agencies, which have said at least 7,000 Russian troops have so far been killed and as many as 20,000 injured.
Russia’s eagerness to hide the true number of Russian troop deaths comes as Russia reportedly struggles to replenish ammunition in Ukraine and can’t even feed its own army. Coping with a major food shortage, Russian troops have reportedly begun slaughtering pigs, depleting Ukrainian farmers’ potato stocks, and stealing whatever they can find as they continue their advance across Western Ukraine.
Doctors and medical professionals helping treat Russian soldiers in Belarusian hospitals have also reportedly been ordered not to talk about their work helping the troops and not to release information relating to deaths and injuries.
Not only is the true number of Russian troop deaths unknown, but nobody really knows how many innocent civilians have died since the invasion began almost four weeks ago.
Jack Buckby is a British author, counter-extremism researcher, and journalist based in New York. Reporting on the U.K., Europe, and the U.S., he works to analyze and understand left-wing and right-wing radicalization, and reports on Western governments’ approaches to the pressing issues of today. His books and research papers explore these themes and propose pragmatic solutions to our increasingly polarized society.
