VLADIMIR PUTIN doesn’t want you to know the staggering cost of his war in Ukraine.
A Russian government filing is demanding the removal of GlobalMilitary.net’s “Russia-Ukraine war military losses tracker” from international search results.
Said to contain “information prohibited for public distribution in the Russian Federation,” the tracker shows that Ukraine has managed to destroy or damage 288 Russian aircraft and 36 naval vessels, inflicting disproportionate high-value losses on a military with a budget nearly double its own.
While Russia’s massive arsenal allows for heavy losses, raw attrition figures seemingly contradict the official Kremlin narrative, with strikes on strategic bombers, Black Sea Fleet vessels, and airfields inside Russian territory.
The Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor) sent the demand to Google on April 06, 2026, citing an order from the Polyarny District Court of the Murmansk Region (Полярный районный суд Мурманской области).
Google does not appear to have delisted the offending webpage, per my own web searches and the Lumen Database, which collects and archives Internet takedown requests. The Polyarny court, however, has ordered that it be added to Roskomnadzor’s own database of banned URLs.
Reads the order:
In accordance with No. 7 of Article 15.1. of the Federal Law dated 27.07.2006 No. 149-FZ “On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection” we notify you that on the basis of a decision of court/state body decision (Polarny district court – Murmansk region) dated 30.03.2026 No 2а-430/2026 Internet web-site page (s) link (s) https://www.globalmilitary.net/conflicts/ukraine-war/ was (were) included in the “Unified register of domain names, Internet web-site page links and network addresses enabling to identify the Internet web-sites containing the information prohibited for public distribution in the Russian Federation”, the number of the register entry is 3829802-РИ due to the fact that this Internet web-site page (s) link (s) contains prohibited for distribution in the Russian Federation on the basis of a decision of court.
It is necessary to immediately inform the owner of the revealed Internet web-site about this fact, and to notify him of the need to remove the information prohibited for distribution in the Russian Federation immediately.
After receiving from the hosting provider a notification of inclusion of the domain name and (or) the Internet web-site page link in the Register, the Internet website owner shall take immediate measures to remove and (or) to limit the access to the Internet web-site containing information prohibited for distribution in the Russian Federation.
In case the Internet web-site owner fails to fulfill this requirement, the hosting provider must restrict the access to the web-site in question within 24 hours from the receipt of the notification.
In case the Internet web-site owner fails to fulfill this requirement or to act appropriately, the hosting provider is required to limit an access to this Internet web-site within 24 hours.
In case the hosting provider and (or) the Internet web-site owner fail to take these measures, the network address enabling to identify Internet web-sites containing the information prohibited for distribution in the Russian Federation will be decided to be entered into the Register and to be limited for access by operators.
It’s unclear who owns GlobalMilitary.net, which cites “democratizing access to military data through the power of open-source intelligence” as its mission statement, and includes data on military conflicts from around the globe.
Since 2022, Russia has tightened its grip on critics of its government and of the Ukrainian war, while resorting to increasingly flamboyant propaganda. Measures have included mass censoring of independent media, staging fake FBI raids on Russian action films, paying Donald Trump Jr. and Rudy Giuliani to praise fictional Russian heroes, and possibly murdering Yevgeny Prigozhin—who led the attack on Ukraine but mysteriously died in a fiery plane crash after turning his tanks on Moscow.
Full disclosure: This blog was added to Russia’s blacklist in 2024 for reposting an image of Vladmir Putin with a Hitler moustache.
Strike two: My former editor John Paczkowski and I were called “boorish and offensive” by Prigozhin when we asked about the aforementioned fake FBI raids and Trump-Giuliani endorsements for my 2022 BuzzFeed News investigation.
That image once again, in case you missed it:
source (defunct)
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