A charred Russian tank and captured tanks are seen amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine in Sumy region, Ukraine, March 7, 2022. Irina Rybakova/Press Service of the Ukrainian Ground Forces/Handout via REUTERS/File Photo
LONDON, March 22 – A Russian newspaper has accused hackers of posting fake news on its website after a brief report appeared there that nearly 10,000 Russian soldiers had been killed in Ukraine.
The incident was the second apparent breach in a week in the tightly controlled war narrative the Kremlin is promoting through loyal Russian media.
An online article on the site of the mass newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, still accessible through a web archive, quotes the Russian Defense Ministry as saying 9,861 Russian soldiers were killed and 16,153 wounded in what Moscow is calling its special military operation in Ukraine .
Those figures had been removed from a version of the same article seen on the website on Tuesday.
Instead, an advisory said: “On March 21, access to the administrator interface on the Komsomolskaya Pravda website was hacked and a fake insert was made in this publication about the situation surrounding the special operation in Ukraine. The inaccurate information was immediately removed.”
Russia has not officially updated its casualty figures since it announced on March 2 that 498 soldiers had been killed and 1,597 injured. Since then, their offensive has met further fierce resistance from the Ukrainian Army and Volunteer Defense Forces.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in a conference call on Tuesday that he could not comment on the Komsomolskaya Pravda incident because it was a question to the newspaper. He said he had no information on casualty numbers.
Alexander Gamov, a Kremlin correspondent for the newspaper, said on the same call that their website had been hacked and fake information appeared there for several minutes.
Earlier, Ukrainian Presidential Advisor Mykhailo Podolyak drew attention to the two online versions of the newspaper article and the alleged figure of 9,861 Russian deaths.
“This is just the beginning of the realization of their national catastrophe. Because in the real world there are almost twice as many killed Russians,” Podolyak wrote on Telegram.
It has not been possible to independently verify the alleged accident claims.
Komsomsolskya Pravda is among Russian media outlets that have faithfully followed President Vladimir Putin’s line that Moscow is conducting a special operation in Ukraine to demilitarize and “denazify” the country – an argument shared by Ukraine and the West rejected as a false pretext to invade a democratic country.
Last week, an editor of Channel One’s state television news appeared live on the studio for several seconds, shouting anti-war slogans and holding up a “NO WAR” placard during an evening newscast. The woman, Marina Ovsyannikova, was fined 30,000 rubles ($280) by a court after the Kremlin denounced her protest as “hooliganism”.
Reporting by Mark Trevelyan Editing by Mark Heinrich