Komsomolskaya Pravda reported the deaths of 9,861 Russian military personnel in Ukraine, and deleted the information a day later.
On March 20, the newspaper, citing a briefing by the Ministry of Defense, wrote that the department «denies the information of the Ukrainian General Staff about allegedly large-scale losses of the RF Armed Forces in Ukraine.
“According to the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, during the special operation in Ukraine, the Russian Armed Forces lost 9,861 people killed, 16,153 people were injured,” the article said. At the same time, there was no such data in the briefing itself.
Screenshot of Komsomolskaya Pravda publication
Information about the death of 9,861 soldiers was on the Komsomolskaya Pravda website for about a day. The publication was noticed on Twitter, after which, on the evening of March 21, the paragraph about deaths was deleted, a copy with death data remained in the web archive.
Later newspaper management reported an “attempt to hack” the site. “March 1 on the website of "Komsomolskaya Pravda" access to the administrator's interface was hacked and a fake stuffing was made into the publication about the situation around the special operation in Ukraine. Inaccurate information was immediately removed,” the message says.
The Ministry of Defense officially reported the deaths of the Russian military only once. As of March 2, during the war with Ukraine, 498 soldiers were killed, another 1,597 were wounded. The authorities do not officially report the losses of Russia, but regional governors, local newspapers, urban and rural public pages on VKontakte do it for them.
According to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, about 14.7 thousand people have died since the beginning of the invasion in Ukraine Russian military.
Updated and corrected at 23:34. An explanation of Komsomolskaya Pravda has been added, and therefore the title has been changed.