A 44-year-old pro-war Russian blogger, Andrey Morozov, has reportedly died by suicide days after he claimed that Russia suffered huge losses in Ukraine.
Morozov, who served as a soldier on the front line in Ukraine, made the revelation in a Telegram post on his channel on Sunday.
He wrote that Russia lost 16,000 personnel and 300 pieces of armour during its assault on the Ukrainian city of Avdiivka. The city fell to Russia on Saturday. The fall of Avdiivka is being termed as Russia's first major success in Ukraine in more than nine months.
In his last post on Tuesday, he said he had decided to "execute" himself. Morozov claimed that he was being pressured by his superiors to delete the post about the losses in Ukraine, per a report in The Independent.
"We spoke with him at night, two or three hours before what happened. We agreed to write it off in the morning," lawyer and friend Maxim Pashkov wrote Wednesday on Telegram. "You were a true friend".
This is not the first time someone critical of Russia's war in Ukraine has died in unexplained circumstances.
Mozorov's death comes days after Vladimir Putin critic Alexei Navalny's death in an Arctic prison. Navalny was behind several reports that detail corruption in Russia and the Putin administration.
Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, who led a rebellion against Putin in June last year, also died under suspicious circumstances in a plane crash. The 62-year-old was travelling in a private plane when it crashed between Moscow and Saint Petersburg. All 10 people on board died, including three crew members.
Prigozhin's death does not come as a shock since Putin's enemies have a history of meeting their deaths under mysterious circumstances.
Last week, a Russian helicopter pilot who defected to Ukraine in August last year was found dead in Spain, according to Ukrainian intelligence agencies.
The pilot, Maksym Kuzminov, was found dead on February 13 in an underground parking lot near Alicante. His body had at least five bullet wounds. Kuzminov had been living in Spain with a Ukrainian passport and an alternative name. Kuzminov was a former captain in Russia's 319th separate helicopter regiment.
Several prominent Russians have died in unexplained circumstances over the last two years. A majority of these deaths were deemed accidental, like falling out of windows or down the stairs.
Media reports have claimed that the son of Putin's ally, Igor Sechin, died in "strange" circumstances earlier this month. Igor is the CEO of Russian state-owned oil giant Rosneft.
The death of 35-year-old Ivan Sechin, Igor's son, came to light after an exiled Russian oligarch, Leonid Nevzlin, took to Facebook to highlight that he found information about Ivan's death in Russia's national register of inheritance cases.
At least 12 high-ranking Russian oligarchs have died since the start of the war. Most of them had links to the country's energy industry.
In a similar incident reported in December 2022, a former Russian army chief with ties to Ukraine died "suddenly" at the age of 69, a day after President Putin abruptly cancelled a trip to the general's workplace in the Nizhny Tagil region.
In the same month, a Russian businessman and lawmaker named Pavel Antov was found dead in a hotel in the Indian state of Odisha. The multi-millionaire died after falling from the third floor of his hotel in the Rayagada district of the state. He died just two days after his fellow traveller, Vladimir Budanov, also died at the same hotel.
A third Russian citizen was found dead in the Indian state of Odisha just weeks after Antov's death. The deceased was identified as 51-year-old engineer Milyakov Sergy. He was found dead onboard a cargo ship docked at Paradip Port in Jagatsinghpur district of the state.
He was the captain of the vessel M.B. Aldnah, which was on its way to Mumbai from Chittagong Port in Bangladesh via Paradip. The police believe that he might have died of a heart attack after "suddenly collapsing onboard the ship."
