A Russian military blogger dies after criticising army losses
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Ukrainian soldiers preparing to fire a howitzer towards Russians advancing on Avdiivka, Ukraine.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
NEW YORK - A pro-war Russian military blogger died on Feb 21, his lawyer said, after the blogger wrote that the country’s military pressured him to remove a post exposing the scale of its losses in a recent battle in Ukraine.
The blogger, Mr Andrei Morozov, claimed in his post that Russia had lost 16,000 men and 300 armoured vehicles in its assault on the Ukrainian city of Avdiivka, which the Russians captured last week.
He deleted the post on Feb 20, after what he said was a campaign of intimidation against him.
The following morning, Mr Morozov published a series of posts on Telegram outlining the complaints he had received from Russian military command and Kremlin propagandists about his expose.
In the posts, he threatened to end his life.
His lawyer Maksim Pashkov confirmed the death in a written response to questions. He did not specify a cause.
Mr Morozov’s death was reported earlier on Feb 21 by Russian state media, a pro-Russian official in occupied Ukraine, and various prominent Russian military bloggers.
Such ultranationalist bloggers were initially tolerated in the war: They supported the Russian military and raised attention to problems for its troops.
But they have been suppressed after the mutiny in 2023 of Mr Yevgeny Prigozhin, who built the paramilitary force known as Wagner and championed similar views.
Mr Prigozhin died in August in a plane crash that Western officials have blamed on the Kremlin.
Another prominent ultranationalist blogger, Igor Girkin, was jailed on charges of extremism, pushing other, lesser-known critics to largely toe the official line.
The intimidation described by Mr Morozov, 44, also comes as the Russian government is attempting to stamp out remaining expressions of dissent after the death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
The government has detained hundreds of people for trying to lay flowers at impromptu memorials or expressing public tribute to Navalny in other ways.
On Feb 20, the government said it had detained a dual US and Russian citizen on an accusation of treason. A lawyers’ group said the accusation stemmed from a US$50 (S$67) donation to the Ukrainian war effort.
The associates of Mr Morozov, the blogger, have not alleged foul play in their public tributes, claiming he shot himself. But in the posts published shortly before his death, Mr Morozov described threats and intimidation against him.
“Many people in my life have tried to threaten, pressure, convince me,” Mr Morozov wrote in a post on Feb 21. “Their final argument: ‘You will not change anything!’” NYTIMES