“We confirm the sending of a letter from the ambassador to the NYT chief editor with a request to post a refutation,” TASS quoted the diplomats as saying.
Earlier, the Russian Foreign Ministry stated that they had prepared letters to the editors of the Financial Times and NYT demanding "a refutation of the published misinformation."
As noted by Daniel Roads, vice president of communications at NYT, the publication is confident in the accuracy of its information on mortality statistics.
NYT published an article in which, citing the Moscow government’s open data portal, it said that mortality in the city in April exceeded the average for the last five years by 1.7 thousand.
There were 642 counted deaths with COVID-19 in Moscow at the time of publication, after which the newspaper concluded that there was a “significant underestimation” of the statistics of deaths from coronavirus.