The Russian soldier who wrote about the heavy losses during the storming of Avdeevka allegedly committed suicide

Friends of the Russian blogger Alexander Morozov, who fought in the Luhansk separatist army, and then the Russian armed forces in Ukraine since 2014, reported his suicide. Before that, the military reported that the Russian army could lose 16 thousand people killed during the capture of Avdeevka. As written in one of his last telegram posts, his superiors forced him to delete this post.

Morozov is a Stalinist blogger, known in the mid-2000s as the Fighting Cat Murz. In 2008, he became the first Russian blogger convicted under an extremist article for publishing on the Internet. Then he was sentenced to three years in prison for posting on Livejournal social networks and illegal possession of weapons. In May 2014, the blogger went to Ukraine to fight as part of pro-Russian separatists in Donbas. He managed to join them at the second attempt: the first time he was captured and interrogated by Russian Cossacks in Luhansk.

Since 2014, Morozov has been a communications officer in one of the divisions of the separatist armed forces in Luhansk. He regularly wrote about the course of hostilities in the Telegram channel (now it has about one hundred thousand subscribers). He complained about high losses, the incompetence of the Russian military leadership, which sends unprepared units into frontal attacks, corruption, and hiding losses behind hurrah-patriotism. This led to conflicts with management. After another one of them, in the fall of 2023, he went to the front line.

On February 18, Morozov published a post in which he reported, citing an unnamed source, that 16,000 Russian soldiers had died in the battles for Avdeyevka from October to February. At the same time, the Ukrainian army retreated in an organized manner, Morozov wrote, which contradicts the official Russian position. The publication provoked sharp criticism from Russian pro-war bloggers and propagandists.

On February 20, Morozov deleted the post. In a series of last entries in the telegram, which presumably became a suicide note, he wrote that he was forced to do this on the orders of the battalion commander.

“Comrade Colonel, on your order I was forced to delete a post from my Telegram channel … And you were forced to give this order by your command, relying on the good old army collective responsibility. If you don’t delete it – we won’t give you supplies. Shells. Helicopters. New tanks and BMP. And you, your command, were forced to do this by political prostitutes led by Vladimir Soloviev, who dare to come and pull the trigger themselves. Well, I will do it myself. I will shoot myself if no one dares to take on this trivial matter And they will give you tanks and copters,” the message says.

According to Morozov, he wrote an appeal to the military prosecutor’s office complaining about the state of affairs in his regiment. According to Morozov, 30 percent of the personnel remained in it, the rest were wounded, killed or missing. Wounds are not registered. Soldiers are offered to buy medicine at their own expense. The mobilized are put under the command of the PMC, which consists of “former prisoners, drug addicts and looters” who rob them.