A pro-war Russian military blogger died on Wednesday, his lawyer said, after the blogger wrote the country’s military pressured him to remove a post exposing the scale of its losses in a recent battle in Ukraine.
The blogger, Andrei Morozov, claimed in his post that Russia had lost 16,000 men and 300 armored vehicles in its assault on the Ukrainian city of Avdiivka, which the Russians captured last week. He deleted the post on Tuesday after what he said was a campaign of intimidation against him.
The following morning, Mr. Morozov published a series of posts on Telegramoutlining the complaints he had received from Russian military command and Kremlin propagandists about his exposé. In the posts, he threatened to end his life.
His lawyer, Maksim Pashkov, confirmed the death in a written response to questions. He did not specify a cause.
Mr. Morozov’s death was reported earlier on Wednesday by Russian state media, a pro-Russian official in occupied Ukraine, and various prominent Russian military bloggers, a loose community of veterans, pro-government war correspondents and military experts who have become a major source of information about the war in Russia.
The intimidation described by Mr. Morozov, 44, comes amid the Russian government’s wider attempts to stamp out remaining expressions of dissent following the death of the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny last week.
