SENT TO DIE

Humiliating Leak Exposes Dark Truth Putin Tried to Hide

The sheer scale of Russians killed in the Ukraine war has been revealed in hacked data.

The vast number of Russians killed in the war in Ukraine has been revealed in a humiliating Kremlin leak.

According to documents leaked from a Russian state statistics agency, Rosstat, by hackers from the Silent Crow group, 450,000 Russians have been killed in Vladimir Putin’s four-year conflict.

The death toll makes the conflict the deadliest for Russia since World War II, which claimed more than 26 million Soviet lives.

The Ukraine war is now the 4th biggest cause of death in Russia, above strokes, and 6.2 men have been killed for every square kilometer of Ukrainian territory taken.

The figure includes those killed in fighting, and also those killed by wounds sustained in the war, by illness, suicide, or road accidents related to the conflict.

The Belarus Cyber Partisans, one of the groups involved in the hack, released a lower figure of 393,881 killed because it only counted soldiers and civilians killed in combat or in long-range strikes.

“This is the most significant leak of data when it comes to Russian casualties,” Janis Kluge, head of the Russia and Eurasia division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told The Moscow Times. “I think it’s established as a fact that the war has never been more deadly than it is right now.”

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The leaks are a blow to Putin, who has long tried to conceal the huge scale of Russia’s losses in Ukraine. The last time the Kremlin revealed casualty figures was in September 2022, when Russia said nearly 6,000 men had been killed only 7 months after Russia launched its unprovoked invasion.

Russia has conscripted thousands of prisoners into its military and also boosted its ranks by offering relatively lucrative contracts for those joining up.

Its military has launched waves of so-called “meat grinder” attacks, in which soldiers are sent out to assault Ukrainian positions in head-on, high-casualty assaults that result in only limited territorial gains.

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At the same time, Ukrainian drone surveillance and attacks have meant that the ability of Russians to maneuver and conceal themselves on the battlefield is limited, creating a front-line “kill zone.”

The CIA said earlier this year that Russian recruits dispatched to the front line in Ukraine lasted about half an hour before being killed or wounded, on average.

The latest figures roughly tally with those released by the U.K.’s GCHQ intelligence agency in May, which said that nearly 500,000 Russians had been killed in the war.

According to reports, the Kremlin is considering compulsory mobilization of thousands more men to bolster its numbers, though it has denied this.

The war is also impacting the Russian economy, with long-range Ukrainian drone strikes targeting oil refineries, causing spiking inflation and gas shortages.

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Tom PorterBreaking News Reporter

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