The figure that Russia hides from its citizens

BarcelonaA group of pro-Ukrainian hackers linked to the Belarusian opposition took advantage of a security breach on November 1st to penetrate the archives of the Russian state statistics agency and find the information that Vladimir Putin's own government has been hiding from its population since the start of the war: how many deaths have occurred on the Ukrainian front since the beginning of the invasion in 2022. The revealed figure is staggering: the hackers have found 412,576 death certificates related to the war. Just to put it in context: during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, between 1979 and 1989, it is estimated that there were about 15,000 casualties, although some estimates increase this figure to 25,000. To find figures similar to those in Ukraine, one must go back to the Russian Civil War or the two world wars.

Russia, therefore, is suffering many more casualties than it had initially planned, a human cost that in any other country would be unsustainable and would have brought down the government. To avoid this, Vladimir Putin has been closing off Russia more and more, hiding all negative information about the war from his citizens and stifling all manifestations of internal dissent. The latest case has been the closure of the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, which was the last bastion of free press remaining in the country and on October 30th announced that it was shutting down permanently. The regime had cut off all its sources of funding, making the journalistic project unviable. In the newsroom, by the way, the office of journalist Anna Politkovskaya remained intact; she was murdered by the Russian secret services precisely on the day of Putin's birthday in 2006.

In parallel, the persecution and banning of all political parties not loyal to Putin has been carried out, until not a single one remains. The main opposition leader to Putin, Alexei Navalny, died in prison in 2024, in what was clearly a political assassination. This is the Russia against which the Ukrainians are fighting, in a war where American and European foreign aid is key to resisting on the battlefield.

It is in this context that a round of negotiations between Russia, Ukraine, and the United States will take place this Tuesday in Abu Dhabi. The Kremlin has explicitly vetoed the participation of the European Union, something that does not seem to concern Donald Trump at all, as he is anxious to be able to say that he has put an end to the conflict, even at the price of betraying the Ukrainians. There is, therefore, a danger that the summit will become a trap for Volodymyr Zelensky, who cannot refuse an initiative led by Washington without risking being left without military aid that is absolutely key. Just in case, in recent weeks both armies have been focusing on striking the enemy's energy infrastructure, with the goal of undermining the morale of the civilian population ahead of a winter that is expected, once again, to be very complicated.