Past behavior is not encouraging. The following list of official cumulative tallies shows clearly that the Russian government is under-representing the number of servicemen they have lost. The following table represents an attempt to keep a daily tally of the official claims of both sides as to the number of Russian casualties. As can be readily seen from the table, the information is not reported in a consistent and regular manner. The chief source used was the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service, via ITAR-TASS and Interfax.
Specific citations are available from the author.
The Chechen side reported that a group of RF military intelligence officers was killed without saying how many servicemen were in the group.