Russia instructs pension fund to conceal payments to Ukraine war participants amid efforts to hide military losses
Russia's Pension Fund has sent a letter to its regional branches instructing their employees not to disclose information about social payments to participants of the war in Ukraine, a move that could reveal the extent of the Russian military's losses, according to the Ukrainian Centre for National Resistance.
In particular, branches in the Kursk, Bryansk, and Belgorod regions have been directed to stop uploading data regarding financial support and social measures for participants of the so-called "Special Military Operation” and their families into the "Unified State Information System for Social Security".
Additionally, the Russia-installed administrations in the occupied territories of Ukraine have been ordered to limit the number of individuals with access to information about the presence and numbers of Russian personnel in Ukraine.
With presidential elections looming in Russia, authorities are attempting to limit information about the death toll of Russian citizens in the war against Ukraine, fearing the rise of anti-Putin sentiments, the centre reports.
Russian investigative news outlet Important Stories ("Vazhnye Istorii") has reported that, in the open data section of the Unified State Information System for Social Security, figures on support for military personnel and their families are published, which includes those killed during military service. The data that the Pension Fund has banned from being published could have shown both Russian army's casualties and the number of those who received disability.
For instance, the data on the support received by "widows of servicemen killed while on duty" could suggest the extent of losses. However, due to the ban on inputting data related to "Special Military Operation participants", this number, according to reports, saw only a slight increase in comparison with the pre-war period (113,000 widows in January 2022 against 117,000 in December 2023).
On January 12, the Ukrainian Armed Forces published the report on the losses of the Russian forces on the southern front. According to the report, 27 units of Russian military equipment had been destroyed and over four hundred Russian soldiers killed in a single day.
Earlier reports indicated that in the past three months, Russia's offensive in the Donetsk and Kharkiv regions had failed to produce significant results. The Russian troops did not achieve success, and at the same time, they sustained considerable losses, including both in personnel and more than 400 units of combat equipment.