As many Russians killed near Pokrovsk in Ukraine as Soviet troops killed in the 1945 Battle of Berlin, according to hacked data (Ukraine Battlefield update, Day 1,720)

Every day, the Ukraine Battlefield update newsletter offers a clear look at how the war is unfolding on the ground. Subscribe for free here to get the full text delivered to your inbox. Belarusian and Ukrainian hackers obtained data on dead Russian soldiers from Russia’s statistics agency. Russian data shows 400,000 Russians have been killed in total They show that 74,000 Russian soldiers had been killed in Pokrovsk by December. More Ukrainians, however, died near Robotyne. The brother of Zelensky adviser Mykhailo Podolyak was also killed fighting for Russia. Chart of the day: Number of Ukrainian attacks using Neptune, Flamingo and Storm Shadow missiles. Videos of the day: an attack on the Rubicon base more than 100 km from the front line; an owl fascinated by a drone. Since the start of the invasion of Ukraine, more Russian soldiers have been killed than in all other Soviet and Russian wars since the Second World War combined. This already exceeds the number of US soldiers killed in the Second World War. In reality, the war has thus killed at least one percent of Russia’s male population aged 18 to 60. This follows from data on the number of Russian soldiers killed, published over the weekend by two hacking groups. The Belarusian pro-opposition group Cyber Partisans and Ukrainian hackers Silent Crow wrote that they had hacked Russia’s statistics agency, Rosstat, and obtained 23 terabytes of data. These included records of deaths in Russia in recent years. The data can be used to reconstruct the number of Russian soldiers killed since the beginning of the invasion. “In terms of Russian losses, this is the biggest information leak,” German economist Janis Kluge, who researches Russia’s wartime economy and military recruitment, told The Guardian newspaper. To read this story, log in or subscribeEnjoy access to all articles and 25 years of archives, comment and gift articles. Become a subscriber for as low as €1,75 per week.Read without limitsAlready a subscriber? Login