Friends of Russian blogger Alexander Morozov, who had fought in the Luhansk separatist ranks and then the Russian armed forces in Ukraine since 2014, announced that he had killed himself. Before the news of his death became known, the Russian military wrote on a Telegram channel that the Russian army suffered heavy losses during the capture of Avdiivka that could reach 16,000 dead. As he wrote in a recent post, the military command forced him to take it down.

Sergeant Morozov who had the channel “Nam pishut iz Yanini”(“They are writing to us from Yanina”) and had served as a sergeant in military units of the self-proclaimed “People’s Republic” of Donetsk, committed suicide because of the intimidation he suffered from official Russian propagandists.

The suicide of “Murz”, as was his diminutive, was confirmed by the bloggers of the channels “PriZrak Novorosii”, “Soldatskaya Pravda”, “Zapiski Vetrana”, as well as his wife, convicted for “extremist activity” of former Russian FSB officer Igor Strelkov Miroslava Reginskaya and lawyer Maxim Paskov.

The BBC’s Russian service could not independently confirm the information.

In his latest posts on his own Telegram channel (he had more than 100,000 followers) was a note and his will, as well as the letter he addressed to the chief military prosecutor, in which he states that there is an acute shortage of ammunition, heavy casualties, the soldiers are not replaced, shortages in medical care in his units, negligence and opacity of the military leadership.

Before that Marozov in his post about the capture of Avdiivka wrote that the capture of the city had resulting in 16,000 dead and about 300 damaged tanks

“And the enemy, conducting defensive battles, suffered at best for us irreparable losses amounting to 5-7,000 men in the same period (this is my rough estimate and not any known facts) says “goodbye” and leaves ».

Several Russian propagandists subsequently criticized Morozov. One of them called his post “another defeatist cry, which looks a lot more like fakes and slanders against the Russian Ministry of Defense.”

According to Morozov, the order to remove him from his post was given under pressure from the associates of Russian TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov, who had intimidated him. Referring to them he wrote that “they are pissed off to come and pull the trigger themselves. Well, I’ll do it myself. I will kill myself if no one dares to deal with this trivial matter. And then you will be given tanks and helicopters.”

Morozov is a Stalinist blogger known in the mid-2000s as Fighting Cat Murz. “Murz Fighting Cat”. In 2008, he became the first Russian blogger to be convicted of extremist activity for his online posts. He was then sentenced to three years in a penal colony for posts on the social network Livejournal and illegal possession of weapons. In May 2014, he went to Ukraine to fight as part of pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass. He managed to join them on the second attempt: the first time he was captured and tortured by Russian Cossacks in Luhansk.