Since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, no fewer than 227,680 Russian servicemen have died, whose names were established by journalists from the independent Russian media outlet “Mediazona“ and the BBC Russian Service, together with a team of volunteers. However, the actual number of those killed is likely higher, as the list of names is based solely on publicly available data, the BBC notes.
1,577 days have passed since the start of the war, making it longer than both World War I and the Great Patriotic War (this is what Russia calls World War II after Hitlerite Germany's attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 - ed.), wrote “Mediazona“ on Monday, June 22.
The largest share of “volunteers” among the dead is 83,384 people. The deaths of 25,662 former prisoners and 19,149 mobilized soldiers have also been confirmed. In addition, journalists have information according to which over 7,200 officers from the Russian army and other security forces were also killed. Among the dead are 15 generals: five lieutenant generals, seven major generals, two retired generals, as well as a general from the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) who fled to Russia, the journalists said.
The regions with the largest number of confirmed victims remain Bashkortostan and Tatarstan.
Russia's losses in Ukraine are increasing every year
Based on the data they collected on the losses of the Russian army, the journalists identified a number of patterns. One of them is that Moscow's losses are increasing with each passing year. In 2023 and 2024, they were at least twice as high as the previous year's figures, with the peak each time being in December, while in the summer, as a rule, a certain decline was observed.
However, the share of officers among the dead is decreasing: if at the beginning of the war they accounted for up to 10% of all losses, by November 2024 their share had dropped to 2-3%. “This is due to the change in the nature of the fighting and the active recruitment of private volunteers, in whom the mortality rate is many times higher than that of higher-ranking officers“, points out “Mediazona“.
About half a million Russians have actually died in Ukraine
In addition to the list of names, the independent Russian media, together with “Medusa“, keeps separate statistics on those who died at the front based on the register of inheritance cases. According to these estimates, about 352 thousand servicemen from the Russian Federation have died since the beginning of the war against Ukraine.
According to military experts interviewed by the BBC, the analysis based on open sources may reflect approximately 45 to 65 percent of the total number of deaths. Based on these estimates, the actual number of Russian military killed could be approximately 344,000 to 497,000, the British public media outlet also said.
Author: Jean Rofe