Russian soldier deaths in Ukraine surpass 120,000, investigation reveals
According to joint calculations by BBC Russia, Meduza, and Mediazona, over 120,000 Russian soldiers have died since the start of the war in Ukraine. This amounts to approximately 200-250 deaths per day. Journalists used an advanced algorithm and collected only confirmed data from multiple sources.
Journalists from Mediazona and Meduza, independent Russian portals, and the Russian-language channel of British television BBC, undertook the task of counting the number of deaths among Russian army soldiers from 24 February 2022, the beginning of the war in Ukraine, to 21 June 2024.
The main sources of this information are obituaries published by local authorities, schools, or relatives of the deceased on social media, farewell announcements, and photos from burial sites, according to the report authors.
Based on this, they calculated the exact number of 56,585 killed. However, this is only a subset of the fallen. The authors also developed a second method, counting deaths by studying the Russian inheritance registry.
The journalists decided to consider only Russian citizens to ensure the data was as reliable as possible. The estimates do not include the deaths of Ukrainian citizens from the Luhansk and Donetsk regions fighting on the Russian side, nor foreigners recruited by Moscow to fight in Ukraine. This method estimated that by the end of 2023, 75,000 Russian soldiers had died in Ukraine.
- Calculations based on data from the Inheritance Registry require a lot of time(...). For this reason, in addition to working with inheritance documents, we developed a method for rapidly estimating losses, which can be updated weekly, the report authors state.
This concerns the mortality rate of young men in Russia. It turned out that since 2022, the number of deaths in this age group has doubled. Using all these methods and comparing them with collected data, ensuring no death is counted twice, they estimated that up to 250 Russian soldiers die daily in the war in Ukraine.
Ultimately, according to calculations, over 120,000 Russian soldiers have died in the war. The authors caution that their calculations may be underestimated and the actual number could exceed even 140,000 killed.
