The Russian Defense Ministry has advised governors of the Russian regions with the most fallen soldiers in Ukraine to stop publishing obituaries, the Verstka publication, founded by independent journalists, reported Tuesday.
According to this source, quoted by the Efe bureau, the governors of Buryatia, Vologda, Tuva and three other regions received this recommendation.
This order was first recorded by the media outlet Sibir.Realii, which indicated that authorities in Jakasia had received a request from the Russian Ministry of Defense not to publish obituaries of soldiers and mercenaries killed in Ukraine.
One of the federal government’s arguments is that these obituaries are used by the BBC’s Russian delegation and the independent portal Mediazona to calculate the losses of the armed forces in the neighboring country’s conflict.
Russia’s Defense Ministry has not published any new casualty data since September 2022, when Minister Serguei Shoigu acknowledged 5,937 battlefield deaths.
According to calculations by the BBC and Mediazona, at least 25,218 soldiers have died in the war so far.
A Verstka source said Moscow was concerned that information about dead soldiers could spark unrest in regions with the highest death toll.
According to journalists’ calculations, the greatest losses are recorded in Krasnodar (959), Sverdlovsk (955) and Chelyabinsk (808).
In Khakassia (144 dead according to the BBC and Mediazona count) the last obituary was published at the end of April and the governor of Vologda (260 dead so far), Oleg Kuvshinnikov, commented for the last time on the deaths recorded in his region in February.
The Buryatia official stopped publishing obituaries in December 2022, and according to the “media”, this is the fifth Russian region with the most killed soldiers and is known as the province where the partial mobilization was declared in September by President Vladimir Putin .
In Moscow, mayor Sergei Sobyanin has not commented on the number of Muscovites killed in Ukraine since the start of the war (193, according to the BBC and Mediazona) and the governor of St Petersburg has since offered no condolences on his Telegram social media channels . end of April 2022, says Verstka.
The military offensive launched by Russia in Ukraine on February 24, 2022 has so far led to the flight of more than 14.7 million people – 6.5 million internally displaced persons and more than 8.2 million to European countries – according to the latest data from the UN, which classifies this refugee crisis as the worst in Europe since World War II (1939-1945).
Source: DN
