Russian troops are dying at a far faster rate in Chechnya than official figures suggest, two commercial Russian news organisations said yesterday.
Interfax news agency quoted sources in the security forces as saying 926 Russian soldiers had been killed in Chechnya, including 529 in the last month alone. NTV television said 10 times more troops were now being killed than officials let on.
Moscow has not given a combined total figure for its losses in Chechnya for several days, but has continued reporting daily figures in the low single digits since the new year, despite an upsurge in the fighting.
NTV, in a report first broadcast on Sunday, said the numbers of corpses passing through Rostov military hospital in southern Russia frequently reached 30 a day.
The hospital is the central point for all Defence Ministry servicemen killed in Chechnya, NTV said. This does not include the sizeable proportion of Russia's 100,000 troops in Chechnya who are commanded by the Interior Ministry.
NTV said it was not allowed inside the hospital but filmed a visitor who said he had been in the morgue and had seen 30 corpses. Official statistics suggest that the total number of Russian war dead in the four-month campaign against separatist rebels is around 500. The NTV television crew also secretly filmed inside a warehouse at the railway station where workers said they had unloaded 15 corpses on Sunday and 30 on Saturday. War dead are often transported on night trains.
Interfax and NTV, both privately owned, have become the most influential Russian media to challenge so directly official accounts of the war. NTV said on Sunday it had been kicked out of an army pool for journalists for airing an interview with an officer who described large losses in an attack on a column. Newspapers, which tend to have low national circulation in Russia, have also raised questions.
The latest issue of the weekly military newspaper Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye said the "game of numbers" being played with statistics of dead and injured was losing any relation to reality.
"Official statistics did not change even when the fighting became fiercer," the paper said. It said both Russian troops and Chechen rebels were wildly exaggerating their opponents' losses.
"If you count up the [Russian] official numbers [of rebels] killed, around 10,000 of them have been wiped out. Their total numbers last autumn were estimated to be around 40,000 . . . So why can't federal forces get into Grozny or the mountains?"
NTV also filmed inside a military identification office in Rostov. Sitting next to a pile of red folders, each representing a dead soldier, Ms Zinaida Sherbakova said she and her three colleagues each transcribed information from at least six red folders a day onto the military's computers.