Counting the Dead

The Russian authorities do not talk about the casualties its forces have sustained in the war with Ukraine. The last time the Ministry of Defense reported on them was in September 2022, and even then the official figures diverged considerably from estimates by independent researchers. The Kremlin now says that they trust only the figures from the Defense Ministry. The trouble is that there are no figures from the Defense Ministry.

So how many Russians have been killed since the start of the full-scale war with Ukraine in February 2022?

A new investigation by Mediazona, Meduza, and Dmitry Kobak (who teaches machine learning at the University of Tübingen) provides at least approximate figures.

Journalists at Mediazona and the BBC have been counting losses by monitoring obituaries in local media, posts on social media, and new gravestones in cemeteries. They have compiled a list of names, and while it certainly does not reflect the entire state of affairs, it does give us a rough idea of the number of the casualties sustained by the Russian army and Russian PMCs.

But there is another source of data on deaths in Russia—the registry of inheritance cases, in which notaries register all information about deceased Russians who have left behind an inheritance. Since last year, the number of inheritance cases involving deceased men, especially young men, has increased dramatically. Inheritances cases do not account for everyone killed in the war, but even this increase makes it possible to ascertain the real figures for excess male mortality—that is, the actual number of war dead. The authors of the investigation describe in detail how they have unearthed this data.

The tally takes into account the mortality of men under fifty years of age. There are no women at the front, just as there are almost no servicemen much older than fifty there. The journalists also compared their estimates with obituaries: it turned out that the increase in the number of entries in the register and the number of deaths correlate with each other. Moreover, Rosstat’s information about mortality for 2022 also matches these data. (Rosstat have not yet published any information about mortality rates for 2023.)

So, around 25,000 Russian men under the age of fifty perished in the war in 2022. At the same time, the discrepancy that thus arises with Rosstat’s data on excess mortality is only four percent, which is within the margin of error.

Between 24 February 2022 and 27 May 2023, approximately 47,000 Russian men under the age of fifty were killed in the war.

This figure accounts only for servicemen, mercenaries, and convicts killed. It is impossible to count the number of those killed in the DPR and LPR.

The Russian army has also sustained other casualties, for example, men have been wounded, some of them seriously wounded, which are irretrievable losses.

The number of seriously wounded men has been estimated approximately, and the approximate proportion of them to men who have been killed is one to one-point-seven. This means that, in total, at least 125 thousand Russian servicemen have either been killed or seriously wounded during the full-scale war with Ukraine. This is greater than the losses sustained by the Soviet and Russian armies in all the other wars they have fought, from Korea to Chechnya, since the Second World War.”

Source: I Don’t Get It newsletter (Mediazona), 10 July 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader. The emphasis is that of the authors.