A particularly heavy account of the losses of the war in Ukraine in the ranks of the Russian army was published in its online edition on Sunday by the Kremlin-affiliated newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, only to delete it a few hours later.
The newspaper's report the day before yesterday, citing the Defense Ministry, cited 9,861 Russian servicemen killed since the start of the war.
This is a multiple of the 498 dead, the only official account released by Moscow to date.
However, the offending excerpt from the newspaper's text was deleted a few hours later. No explanation has so far been given by the editorial board.
International media questioned the account and whether it was accurate. Some pointed out that on Sunday no account was announced in the daily briefing by the Defense Ministry.
Piracy or crisis of sincerity?
A Wall Street Journal journalist commented via Twitter that either the Komsomolskaya Pravda website was hijacked, or the newspaper had this information from its own sources in the ministry and published it.
If the published figure is accurate, it means that the Russian army's losses in Ukraine are extremely heavy, all the more so because they were suffered in less than a month. By comparison, in the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the former Soviet Union's army lost some 15,000 troops over a nine-year period.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed on Sunday that some 14 have been killed since the invasion of his country began on February 24.000 Russian servicemen.
Neither the number published by the Russian newspaper nor the number given by the head of the Ukrainian state can be independently verified.
The Kremlin is closely monitoring media coverage of the war, which it refers to as a "special military operation."
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