A family member of Russian president Vladimir Putin accidentally revealed what is likely a confidential tally of the appeals by relatives of troops who submitted DNA samples, in an attempt to identify dead soldiers by their remains.
Anna Tsivilyova, the daughter of Mr Putin’s cousin and a deputy defence minister, said the government received tens of thousands of appeals from relatives related to the tracking and identification of missing soldiers through DNA samples.
Ms Tsivilyova was seen talking in a video published by the independent Astra Telegram channel.
Russia and Ukraine have not officially published a tally of their respective military losses of personnel in the nearly three-year-old war and treat the figure as a state secret.
Western intelligence sources estimate the number of Russian dead to be as high as 200,000, with 400,000 wounded.
She was seen talking to the lawmakers in a video published on Tuesday where she said: “The Ministry of Internal Affairs takes [DNA] absolutely free of charge at their own expense, and enters into its database all the relatives who have applied to us. I’ve already said 48,000.”
She was asked, moments later, by defence committee chief Andrei Kartapolov to not disclose this number.
“Anna Yevgenyevna [Tsivilyova] has mentioned figures here, including missing persons. I earnestly ask you not to use these figures anywhere. This is such sensitive, closed information. And when we draw up the final documents, we should not include these figures anywhere,” he said.
Ms Tsivilyova said: “I didn’t give the numbers of missing people, but the number of requests to us. Many of them will be found. So this number is specifically requests, not data.”
Astra published a video of the meeting, which was streamed at the time on the website of parliament’s lower house, the Duma. On Wednesday it was no longer available on the site, Reuters reported.
As late as last month, Russia suffered more than 2,000 casualties in a single day, Ukraine’s military claimed, in what would mark one of the heaviest toll of losses inflicted on Mr Putin’s forces at any point in the war so far.
Russian forces were suffering 1,500 casualties a day and were nearing the 700,000 mark for the total killed and wounded since February 2022, Sir Tony Radakin said last month. He described the cost of the war on the Russian people as “extraordinary”.
According to Astra, a popular Russian Telegram channel, the exchange took place at a parliamentary hearing in late November.
Ukraine and Russia have regularly floated purported numbers of dead and wounded on the enemy side and both Kyiv and Moscow have dismissed their opponents’ estimates as grossly inflated.
