Regardless of the veracity of the reportedly leaked documents, which ISW will not speculate on, the response of Russian milbloggers to the New York Times story highlights the fear of prospective Ukrainian counteroffensives pervading the Russian pro-war information space. [...] While several prominent Russian milbloggers immediately rejected the validity of the documents and suggested that they are fakes, they fixated on the possibility that the released documents are disinformation intended to confuse and mislead Russian military command.[3] One milblogger stated that the document leak could be part of a larger Ukrainian campaign to mislead Russian forces before a count. [...] The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Russian forces did not conduct offensive operations in this direction.[33] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that units of the Eastern Group of Forces (Eastern Military District) prevented an attempted Ukrainian advance in an unspecified location of western Donetsk Oblast.[34] A Russian milblogger noted that elements of the Russian Ministry of 10. [...] The BBC and Russian opposition news 13 Institute for the Study of War and AEI’s Critical Threats Project 2023 outlet Mediazona reported on April 7 that they confirmed in the past two weeks the identities of 1,665 Russian servicemen who died in Ukraine.[49] Mediazona and the BBC stated that the figure is only those casualties they have confirmed from open-sources instead of the current total on the. [...] The Russian Finance Ministry released preliminary data on the Russian Federal Budget from January to March of 2023 on April 7, showing that Russian revenues decreased by 21 percent and expenditures increased by 34 percent compared to the first quarter of 2022.[54] The Finance Ministry claimed that the differences in first quarter budgetary revenues and expenditures between 2022 and 2023 is a resul.
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