A Russian blogger who criticized his country's thousands of casualties in the taking of Avdiivka dies

The conquest of the Ukrainian city of Avdiivka, on the outskirts of Donetsk, had become an obsession for the Russians since they unleashed the war in Donbas in 2014. The well-known blogger specialized in war affairs Andrei Morozov, nicknamed

Murz

, spent the last 10 years on that front as a pro-Russian militiaman and as a reporter.

Ultranationalist and critical of the Russian high command, he said on his Telegram channel that taking the city from kyiv cost the Kremlin thousands of lives from October until its final takeover last week.

The authorities forced him to delete the publication.

This Wednesday it was learned that Murz has died, as announced by other Russian ultranationalist bloggers and confirmed by the president of the Public Chamber [an advisory body] of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, Alexander Kofman.

On Wednesday morning another message appeared on his channel insinuating that he was going to commit suicide.

“In the samurai code of Bushido it was written, among other things: 'Revenge often consists of breaking into the enemy's house and dying.'”

In the message that Murz supposedly published on his Telegram, he blamed his death on the pressure of the Russian high command and the attacks on television by one of the heads of Russian propaganda, Vladimir Solovyov, after putting figures on the conquest of Avdiivka since October.

An anonymous, unverified source of the blogger gave figures: “16,000 irreparable losses on our side—Russia—and about 300 armored vehicles destroyed,” while the Ukrainian army lost at most a third of those casualties, according to his calculations;

between 5,000 and 7,000 combatants “in the best of cases.”

Furthermore, he noted that the Ukrainians would have managed to complete a successful withdrawal without being encircled.

“Today, Comrade Colonel, I have been forced to delete the publication by your order,” Murz wrote to the superior with whom he was at the front.

“Your command forced you to give this order, trusting in the old collective responsibility of the army.

'If you don't eliminate it, we will not provide supplies, ammunition, helicopters, new tanks and infantry transports,' Murz continued.

And your command was forced to do this by political prostitutes headed by Vladimir Solovyov, who urinate on themselves with the idea of ​​coming and pulling the trigger.

Well, I'll do it myself.

I will shoot myself if no one dares to take care of this insignificant matter.

And they will give you tanks and helicopters,” he announced.

According to lawyer Maxim Pashkov, who claims that this Tuesday he spoke with Morozov, the military blogger committed suicide “by shooting himself.”

Soldiers' complaints

The blogger published the complaints of the soldiers of a rifle regiment against their commanders after having been “reduced practically to zero,” like other tank regiments.

“But that's not even the worst thing.

If as a result of all this and the results of Marinka's [offensive] an important criminal case had been opened, it would not have been so bad,” Murz lamented after pointing out in the deleted publication that in the end they refused to investigate anything.

The blogger's data has not been verified and, probably, it will be years before the real figures are known.

The Russian Ministry of Defense has not published an official figure on casualties since September 2022 - and it was already significantly lower than the sea of ​​obituaries published in the country - while the Ukrainian commander in charge of defending the city, Alexander Tarnavsky, estimated that around 47,000 Russians lost their lives in that offensive.

Murz's Telegram channel,

They Write to Us from Ioannina

, had more than 100,000 followers and was known in pro-war Russian sectors.

In addition, he was one of the allies of former Federal Security Service (FSB) colonel Igor Strelkov, one of the Russian commanders who unleashed the war in eastern Ukraine in 2014. The Kremlin, fed up with his criticism of the conduct of the war since which began the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, sentenced Strelkov to four years in prison last January.

The conquest of Avdiivka has been the greatest Russian advance on the front since the capture of Bakhmut, also in the Donetsk region, in April 2023. A day before Murz's alleged suicide, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said: met with President Vladimir Putin to dramatize the importance of this battle a month before the presidential elections on March 17.

“The Avdiivka operation will be included in the history books and will be studied in the higher education institutions of the Russian Ministry of Defense,” Shoigu told Putin after asserting that the Ukrainian forces withdrew in an “uncontrolled flight from the city.”

“The General Staff managed to carry out the operation to capture Avdiivka with minimal losses,” the Defense Minister emphasized.

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