A Russian newspaper called Komsomolskaya Pravda, previously noted for its staunch loyalty to the Kremlin, published an article that quickly disappeared from the site on Sunday claiming 9,861 Russian troops have been killed during the invasion of Ukraine.
Numerous Western news organizations saved archival copies and screen grabs of the article before its apparent deletion.
The Russian government has been very tight-lipped about how many of its soldiers have died in Ukraine. The only official casualty figure, provided very early in the invasion, claimed 498 confirmed deaths.
The figure published by Komsomolskaya Pravda on Sunday was much closer to Western intelligence estimates, which put Russian casualties at somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000.
The Ukrainian state media site Ukrinform claimed on Tuesday that Russia had tallied 15,300 deaths since the war began in February. If this figure is accurate, the number of Russian soldiers killed during a month of fighting in Ukraine has now eclipsed the number of casualties Russia suffered during ten years of fighting in Afghanistan.
The deleted Komsomolskaya Pravda article reportedly claimed that the figure of 9,861 deaths plus 16,153 wounded was supposedly provided by an unnamed Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) official.
Bemused observers suggested that either Komsomolskaya Pravda’s website was hacked, a critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime working at the paper published the number of troop deaths as an act of defiance, or someone at the MoD made a career- (and probably life-) threatening mistake by leaking accurate casualty figures to a newspaper reporter.
According to UK Guardian, editors at the Russian paper decided to go with the “hacked” explanation, retroactively denouncing their own story for containing “inaccurate information” and deleting the number of deaths from the article.
“Access to the administrative interface was hacked on the Komsomolskaya Pravda website and a fake was made in this publication about the situation around the special operation in Ukraine. The false information was immediately deleted,” the Russian paper said in a statement translated by the Guardian.
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