23rd March, 2022
Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda has accused hackers of planting fake news on its website after a report appeared there for more than six hours saying nearly 10,000 Russian soldiers had been killed in Ukraine.
An article on the site of the tabloid, captured by a web archive tool, quoted the Russian defence ministry as saying 9,861 Russian servicemen have been killed and 16,153 wounded in what Moscow calls its special military operation in Ukraine.
Those figures had been removed from a version of the same article visible on the website on Tuesday.
Instead, an advisory said: “On March 21, access to the administrator interface was hacked on the Komsomolskaya Pravda website and a fake insert was made in this publication about the situation around the special operation in Ukraine.
“The inaccurate information was immediately removed.”
If the figures were true, the Russian death toll from the 27-day-old war in Ukraine would equate to about two-thirds of the estimated 15,000 servicemen who died during the 10-year Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979.
Russia has not officially updated its casualty figures since stating on March 2 that 498 servicemen had been killed and 1,597 wounded.
Since then its offensive has run into further heavy resistance from Ukraine’s army and volunteer defence forces.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call on Tuesday that he had no information on casualty numbers. He declined to comment on the website incident, saying it was a question for the newspaper.