❗️On the basis of open sources, the BBC managed to identify the names of 18,631 Russian soldiers who died in the war in Ukraine Over the past two weeks, the BBC Russian Service, together with Mediazona (recognized in Russia as a “foreign agent”) and the team Volunteers managed to establish the names of another 1256 dead. This is substantially higher than the 2022 average. In the first year of a full-scale invasion, losses that could be established from Russian sources remained at the level of 200-300 people per week. Now they are twice as large. More often than others, prisoners who went to the front die. In total, the names of 2377 people who were serving sentences in Russian colonies and who died during the hostilities on the territory of Ukraine have been established. During the second half of March, the list grew by 285 people. It is the prisoners recruited from the colonies in the PMC “Wagner” who play the role of a battering ram in the ongoing battles for Bakhmut. For several months now, Russian troops have been trying to attack under the city, from time to time there are reports of a slight advance in some areas, but the situation as a whole remains unchanged “The city is in a semi-encirclement, but the Russian armed forces fail to take it into the cauldron. The Armed Forces of Ukraine do not show any signs of a planned retreat. From open sources, we know about the death of already 1,672 mobilized Russians. Often they are sent without preparation in frontal assaults on Ukrainian fortified areas. The mobilized regularly try complain about these decisions of the commanders to the president, but the overall picture does not change.The actual level of losses of the Russian army is higher, since not all deaths are reported publicly.Including the wounded, missing and military, as well as those who died fighting in the forces of the self-proclaimed DPR and LPR, the irretrievable losses of the pro-Russian forces during the 13 months of the war could exceed 212,000 people. The General Staff of Ukraine estimates Moscow’s losses at more than 150,000 people. The Russian Ministry of Defense last reported on losses on September 21, reporting the death of 5937 people. We continue to collect data on the dead military personnel. If you would like to share information on this topic, please send an email to (email protected) or contact us via the link. – As we believe In Russia, every day new names of the dead and photographs from the funeral are published. Most often, the names are given by the heads of Russian regions or representatives of district administrations, local media and educational institutions where the deceased previously studied, as well as relatives. The BBC, Mediazona and a team of volunteers are looking into this data and adding it to the list we have been keeping since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. According to BBC Kompromat 2.0 @kompr
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Roman Abramovich secretly financed the Dutch football club Vitesse through a chain of offshore companies. The Guardian writes about it. According to these data, the businessman has invested at least 117 million euros in the club. According to journalists, this is a huge investment, given that for the entire 2014-2015 season, the club’s total turnover amounted to only 14 million euros.
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❗️ Who develops software for Russian cyberattacks, managing a troll factory and isolating the Internet. The international investigation #VulkanFiles “Important Stories” and more than 50 journalists from 11 publications studied the leak of documents from the Vulkan Scientific and Technical Center, a small Moscow IT company that, by order of the SVR, the FSB and the Ministry of Defense, develops software for hacker attacks on foreign infrastructure facilities (for example, a nuclear power plant in Switzerland). In addition, since 2016, Vulkan, by order of the Ministry of Defense, has been developing a system under the code “Amezit”. Its main functions: monitor all Internet users in a given territory; ???? to block for them undesirable, from the point of view of the Ministry of Defense, sites; ???? impose propaganda articles promoted by bots. Information security experts who have studied the documents believe that this system was created for use abroad, including in Ukraine. In addition, “Amezit” is the control center of a huge troll factory. With the help of this program, a serviceman of the Ministry of Defense can create hundreds of bots in a variety of social networks in one click, and then “entrust” them with various tasks: publish posts and videos, comment, like, and increase views on articles. In the #VulkanFiles archive, we found information about the participation of Vulkan bots in the campaign against Hillary Clinton before the US presidential election in 2016 and in the promotion of a conspiracy version of the murder of their own colleague, Colonel Maxim Shapoval, by Ukrainian intelligence services in 2017. Read more about the orders of the Russian special services that were carried out by Vulkan, read the link → #VulkanFiles is an international investigation of Russian cyber troops, in which, in addition to Important Stories, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, The Guardian, Washington Post, Paper Trail Media and other publications took part .
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FBK included businessmen Mikhail Fridman, Aleksey Kuzmichev and German Khan in the list of “corrupt officials and warmongers” FBK director Ivan Zhdanov, commenting on the expansion of the list, wrote: “In fact, at some point, it seemed erroneously that this decision could be waited a little and that Fridman and co. were about to take the side of good, that they could become a vivid example of people who switched on the side of good, condemning the war and declaring its position, no anti-war actions. But, unfortunately, in the second year of the war, they did not pick up clear words. Zhdanov emphasized that the place of these businessmen in the list is “deserved”. According to Meduza Kompromat 2.0 @kompr
