The truth about Russia’s hidden Covid deaths

The secret is out: the Russian government has been lying to its people. Officially, Russia’s coronavirus death toll for last year — as reported on state television and logged at the World Health Organisation — was an impressively low 86,498 for a population of 146 million. In his traditional December press conference Vladimir Putin proudly reeled off statistics on how quickly Russia’s economy was recovering from the pandemic, and last month he made a triumphant address to a packed public concert to celebrate the anniversary of the annexation of Crimea in 2014. ‘Today is a holiday for our entire vast country,’ Putin told an 80,000-strong, maskless crowd at Luzhniki stadium. ‘Please, take a deep breath and answer this: Do we love Russia?’ Covid-19 was not mentioned.

The reality, however, seems to be different. Russia’s excess deaths for last year stand at 323,802, some 18 per cent higher than 2019. Many official Russian death certificates record unexplained ‘viral pneumonia’ as the cause of death, rather than Covid-19.