Counting the Dead: How Many Have Really Died in Ukraine?

As headline figures go, it was truly eye-catching — the kind of number that makes you think someone has accidentally added an extra zero. In late April 2024, the British Minister of State for the Armed Forces gave what appeared to be the UK’s best estimate for Russian casualties in Ukraine: four hundred and fifty thousand, not including those killed and wounded while serving for private military companies such as Wagner. A couple of weeks later, in May, French Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné went one further, putting Russian military casualties in Ukraine at half a million.

To be clear, these are casualty figures rather than deaths. While they include those killed, they also cover the wounded and missing. Still, those are shocking figures, so high as to be almost unbelievable.

Is there any way to go beyond the estimates — to come close to understanding the true death toll of Russian forces in Ukraine, and of the Armed Forces of Ukraine as well?

The Fog of War and the Scale of Russian Losses

Prior to 2022, it was generally understood that the deadliest, most catastrophic war fought by Moscow since WWII had been the Soviet-Afghan War. Running from 1979 till 1989, it killed 15,000 Soviet troops and left perhaps another 35,000 wounded. Although spaced out over ten years, the high death toll caused such fractures in society that Moscow was forced to ultimately withdraw, its war aims unfulfilled.

This matters because even by the most conservative estimates, the scale of Russian losses in Ukraine dwarfs those numbers — as it does any other modern war involving Moscow. The two Chechen Wars are thought to have killed ten thousand on the Russian side. The Russo-Georgian War of 2008 didn’t even see the Russian death toll hit triple figures.

According to the Economist, “By April 2023 Russia had already lost more soldiers by invading Ukraine than it had in all its combined previous wars since 1945.” April 2023, of course, is before some of the bloodiest battles even took place — before the extremely deadly campaign to capture Avdiivka, before Bakhmut even reached its horrific climax. By any sane reckoning, total losses since have likely at least doubled.

Yet precise figures are almost impossible to come by. The Kremlin has only issued one official death toll — claiming a mere 6,000 dead in September of 2022, a laughable undercount even back then. Due to the impact on morale, most states fighting wars try to avoid publicizing catastrophic losses.

Ukraine is also guilty of downplaying its casualties, with President Zelensky recently claiming a mere 31,000 Ukrainian troops have died. The difference, though, is that Ukraine is a relatively open society. Newspapers are free to issue death notices.

Municipalities are encouraged to create local memorial lists. In Russia, wartime laws allow the government to block death notices around sensitive battles and high-casualty Ukrainian strikes, making true figures hard to tease out. There are real consequences for reporting statistics Moscow doesn’t like.

In February, pro-war milblogger Andrey Morozov was found dead of an apparent suicide shortly after publishing casualty figures for the Battle of Avdiivka. The wild variation among foreign estimates reflects this opacity. In spring, the US government briefed that Moscow had suffered over 315,000 casualties, with the death toll perhaps as high as 120,000.

Séjourné put the figures at half a million casualties, with 150,000 deaths. The New York Times reports that various Western intelligence agencies put the figure of Russian dead at “well over 100,000” — a difference of 50,000, the difference between a large town’s worth of people living or dying. While these figures could easily be accurate, it’s not hard to see why countries like the US, UK, and France might have a vested interest in inflating Russian deaths — although that’s not the same as them actually doing so.

The BBC-Mediazona Recorded Names Database

Of all the attempts to dig into Russian casualties, perhaps none is so valuable as the joint investigation carried out by the BBC and independent Russian outlet Mediazona. Started in the early days of the conflict and aided by hundreds of anonymous volunteers, the project aims to create a minimum baseline for the number of Russians killed in Ukraine. Doing so is far from easy.

For a dead man’s name to make it onto the register, their existence and fate have to be proved beyond all reasonable doubt. The database doesn’t contain grainy images of dead bodies shot from a distance and counted as a kill. Volunteers comb local Russian media for death notices and monitor social media for postings from grieving family members.

Out in the real world, they travel the country to photograph new graves in military cemeteries and check for names added to small-town war memorials. The result is the gold standard list for Russian casualties. If a name appears on there, it belonged to a real person who really went and fought in Ukraine and really died.

The flipside is that the list likely represents a severe undercount — something both the BBC and Mediazona freely admit. Not only is this labor-intensive work limited by multiple factors, but it also only covers soldiers from Russia itself. Two of the Kremlin’s major allies — the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics — each supplied tens of thousands of fighters, but the project’s volunteers are unable to replicate their work in the two pseudo-states.

“If they were added, the death toll on the Russian side would be even higher.” On their blog, Mediazona last updated the list on May 24, 2024. On that day, the number of Russian soldiers confirmed dead had reached 54,185.

By way of comparison, that’s nearly as high as the total number of American military deaths during the Vietnam War. Given that it is known to be an undercount, the reasonable assumption is that Russia has — in slightly over two years — lost more of its sons in Ukraine than the USA did across almost two decades in Vietnam. In an article published in April to coincide with the count hitting 50,000, the BBC analyzed why the fighting has been so deadly for the Kremlin.

Their major conclusion: it’s down to a lack of professional, well-trained soldiers. So catastrophic was the initial run at Kyiv during the war’s opening months that many of Russia’s most experienced, most capable troops were effectively taken off the board. In their place came prisoners, volunteers, and mobilized men with sharply lower levels of ability.

Samuel Cranny-Evans of the Royal United Services Institute told the BBC: “This means they have to do things that are a lot simpler tactically — which generally seems to be a forward assault onto Ukrainian positions with artillery support.” Moscow sends waves of soldiers forward relentlessly to try to wear down Ukrainian forces and expose their locations to Russian artillery. The big assaults on fortified cities send the number of names on the list skyrocketing.

Deadliest Battles and the Fate of Storm-Z Battalions

Armed with death dates for many of those killed, the BBC report shows three huge spikes: during the Battle for Bakhmut in spring of 2023, during the failed assault on Vuhledar that same year, and during the Battle for Avdiivka a few months later. Taken together, these three battles are a major part of the reason why the second year of war was deadlier for Russia than the first. It was also deadly for Russia’s most infamous units: the Storm-Z battalions composed of prisoners.

When Wagner first offered convicts the chance to fight for six months to earn their freedom, the wider world was shocked. It seems today that Wagner’s offer was the more humane one. Since the Russian MOD took over the prisoner battalions, the BBC reports that life expectancy among former inmates fighting in Ukraine has dropped from three months to just two.

The promise of freedom after six months has also been scrapped, replaced with contracts that will only expire once the war ends. This is likely a major reason why Putin has so far been able to ride out the impact of over 54,000 dead. Drawn from prisons and Russia’s poorest regions, the dead are simply — sadly — not the people the elites in Moscow and St.

Petersburg care about.

The Russian Probate Registry: Statistical Analysis of Excess Deaths

Using Russia’s Probate Registry, a collaboration between Mediazona, news platform Meduza, and excess mortality researcher Dmitry Kobak at the University of Tübingen was able to track spikes in inheritance claims that went above normal levels. Under Russian law, relatives of the dead have six months to log their claims, which means people are incentivized to do so in a timely manner. The near total lack of females fighting among Moscow’s forces meant the team could control for other variables — such as the lingering effects of COVID — since those would affect both genders.

If the spike was only among men, that would suggest something was killing young men but leaving young women untouched — something like a gigantic war. Given that the registry goes back to 2014 and contains more than 11 million individual cases, the team are extremely confident they’ve built a workable model, one able to filter out background noise and create a likely range of deaths for the Kremlin’s forces. The most recent figures, from March 15, show Moscow’s forces had suffered around 85,000 deaths — the midpoint in a range from a possible low of 76,000 to a potential high of 98,000.

Like the BBC count, it only covers Russian citizens. Militia members from the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics who fought and died for the Kremlin have been excluded, as have men recruited from Central Asian states and places as far afield as Nepal. To account for missing months, Mediazona took a rough monthly death rate of 3,900 for men under fifty in the Russian armed forces.

Applying the same method would give a mid-range of approximately 93,000 dead by the end of May 2024 — a crude method that fails to account for major battles around Kharkiv and for severe ammunition shortages Ukraine experienced. But even the March figure of 85,000 is staggering. Adding the total combat deaths among American forces in both Vietnam and the Korean War yields just over 81,000 — across about twenty-three years of combined involvement.

The Ukraine War has been running for slightly over two. The Probate Registry data shows that during the early push to capture Bakhmut, from January to March 2023, about 2,000 Russians were dying across the front every single week. When Avdiivka was captured, the number of deaths also jumped.

Russian milblogger Andrey Morozov claimed the battle had killed or wounded as many as 16,000 men. Meduza and Mediazona estimated a rough killed-to-wounded ratio for Russian forces: for every soldier killed, between 1.7 and 2 more were wounded. With 85,000 dead, that would imply a bare minimum of another 144,500 wounded, bringing Moscow’s total casualties to nearly 230,000.

At the high end — 98,000 dead and twice as many wounded — it would mean almost 300,000 Russian casualties by mid-March. As Mediazona themselves have written: “This estimate for wounded personnel is much less precise than our fatality figures.” Not quite the half a million casualties claimed by French intelligence, but still a number so vast it towers over all other European conflicts fought since 1945.

Ukrainian Losses: The UA Losses Database

UA Losses is an anonymous database that collates information from newspapers and social media about confirmed Ukrainian deaths. First appearing on December 31, 2023, it has no contact information, does not respond to enquiries, and is run out of St. Kitts and Nevis.

In other words, everything about it should probably scream “Russian information operation.” And yet most serious researchers seem to think it’s real. Volunteers from the Ukrainian-run Book of Memory — intended to memorialize Kyiv’s dead — say a lot of their information overlaps with that of UA Losses.

When Mediazona and Meduza tried pulling out a random sampling of 400 entries, they found that nearly all were backed up with reliable, publicly verifiable data. Of the first 40,000 names on the list, separate researchers found only 1,700 duplicates. Many now believe UA Losses may be the Ukrainian version of the BBC’s recorded names project — the gold standard, bare-minimum baseline for Ukrainian deaths.

Previous estimates of the death toll among Ukraine’s forces have been wildly biased in both directions. On the optimistic side, Zelensky’s public estimate of 31,000 Ukrainians killed is a total so laughably low it can be pretty much immediately dismissed. At the other end, former Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu claimed in February that Kyiv had suffered 444,000 deaths — a number so absurdly inflated that not even Shoigu could actually believe it.

Pro-war Russian milblogger Rybar has been running his own database, but swathes of entries contain little or no identifying details. American intelligence estimates of 70,000 dead Ukrainians by the end of last summer are impossible to verify. At the time of writing, UA Losses reports verified deaths of 51,245 Ukrainian troops.

However, 4,795 of those entries are soldiers who died in the Donbas War that kicked off in 2014 and led directly into the current conflict. Remove their names, and the Ukrainian total since February 24, 2022, drops to 46,450.

Rewriting the Narrative: When Ukraine’s Losses Were Highest

Mediazona used the UA Losses data to create a chart showing how Kyiv’s losses differed from month to month. If accurate, it suggests a rewriting of the narrative of the war’s earliest days. Apart from a major spike in Russian deaths corresponding to the disastrous first week of the invasion, the death toll for Ukraine’s forces was higher than Moscow’s for most of that spring and summer.

This is fascinating, because the prevailing narrative holds that Ukraine only started incurring truly massive casualties when it made the decision to try and hold Bakhmut as long as possible. But the UA Losses data suggests that by early April 2022, Kyiv was already losing more men than Moscow. The Ukrainian casualty count seems to have been high throughout the war, resulting in eye-watering but steady losses.

Even during the failed counteroffensive of summer 2023, the losses seem to have remained consistent rather than spiking wildly. High Ukrainian losses in the conflict’s opening weeks, but no particular spike in mid-2023, is pretty much the exact opposite of the media narrative surrounding this war. Because of the vast difference between the figures in the BBC database and the Probate Registry database for Russian forces, one might expect a similar gap on the Ukrainian side.

However, there are good reasons for assuming that is not the case. The Probate Registry method was required for analyzing Russian deaths because of reporting restrictions. In Ukraine, it is far easier to find death notices or memorial lists that are reasonably accurate.

That means the UA Losses database will be closer to the actual figure than the BBC recorded names database, though exactly how close is open to debate.

The True Ratio of Russian to Ukrainian Dead

Meduza estimates that the range of open-source dead to real dead on the Ukrainian side could be anywhere from 1:1 to 2:1. In the best possible world for Ukraine, the country has lost only as many as are present in the database: 46,450. In the worst possible world, Ukrainian deaths are a lot closer to Russian deaths than anyone in Kyiv would like to admit.

The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. More interesting may be figuring out the difference between deaths among Ukrainian and Russian forces. Meduza states: “If we assume the unlikely scenario in which the UALosses database is complete, the ratio of Russian to Ukrainian fatalities is 1.8-2 to 1.

According to Meduza’s calculations, this is the maximum possible estimate ‘from above’ in favor of Ukraine.” This would seem to counter the prevalent narrative that five Russians are dying for every one Ukrainian killed — something Zelensky himself claimed. At most, it appears that two Russians die for every Ukrainian defender.

In all likelihood, the ratio isn’t even that high. Yet whatever the true ratio, there is no denying one major point: this is an exceptionally bloody war, one in which people’s fathers, sons, and brothers are dying at a terrible rate. Each number on the death tolls represents a real person — a real human being who, in another timeline, would still be alive, a person with a family and friends and people who cared about them, all of whom now have nothing but a hole in their lives where their loved one used to be.

The sad fact is that were the West to halt weapons supplies to Ukraine tomorrow, the killing would not stop. It would simply become more efficient on the Russian side, leading to faster deaths among Kyiv’s troops as Moscow’s war machine swept westward. Were Putin to wake up tomorrow and decide to withdraw his troops, the war would end and the killing would stop.

Vladimir Putin remains ultimately responsible for this suffering — for the misery he has inflicted upon so many in his bloody and meaningless war.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the BBC-Mediazona recorded names project, and what has it found?

The BBC and independent Russian outlet Mediazona jointly run a project that creates a minimum baseline for Russian deaths in Ukraine by confirming each name beyond all reasonable doubt. Volunteers comb local Russian media for death notices, monitor social media for posts from grieving families, photograph new graves, and check war memorials. By May 24, 2024, the project had confirmed 54,185 Russian soldiers dead — nearly as many as total US military deaths in Vietnam — while acknowledging it is a known undercount because it cannot cover fighters from the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics.

How did the Russian Probate Registry method estimate deaths?

Researchers from Mediazona, Meduza, and the University of Tübingen tracked spikes in inheritance claims above normal levels in Russia’s Probate Registry. Because virtually no women fight in Moscow’s forces, any excess in male inheritance claims pointed to war deaths rather than other causes like COVID. Using a database of more than 11 million cases going back to 2014, they estimated approximately 85,000 Russian military deaths by mid-March 2024, within a range of 76,000 to 98,000, excluding Donetsk and Luhansk militia fighters.

Which battles caused the sharpest spikes in Russian casualties?

Armed with death dates for many of those killed, the BBC analysis identified three huge spikes: the Battle for Bakhmut in spring 2023, the failed assault on Vuhledar that same year, and the Battle for Avdiivka in early 2024. During the early push to capture Bakhmut alone, from January to March 2023, roughly 2,000 Russians were dying across the front every single week. Pro-war Russian milblogger Andrey Morozov estimated that the Avdiivka battle killed or wounded as many as 16,000 men.

What is the UA Losses database and how reliable is it?

UA Losses is an anonymous database run out of St. Kitts and Nevis that collects confirmed Ukrainian military deaths from newspapers and social media. Despite its suspicious lack of contact information, researchers who pulled random samples found nearly all entries backed by publicly verifiable data, and a Ukrainian Book of Memory project confirmed significant overlap. Most serious researchers now treat it as a bare-minimum baseline for Ukrainian deaths.

As of the article’s writing, it recorded 46,450 Ukrainian military deaths since February 24, 2022, after removing 4,795 Donbas War deaths predating the full invasion.

What is the true ratio of Russian to Ukrainian deaths?

Meduza estimates that Kyiv’s open-source death count could represent anywhere from the full actual total to only half of it, meaning Ukrainian deaths could be between 46,450 and roughly 93,000. Under the most favorable scenario for Ukraine — where UA Losses is essentially complete — the ratio of Russian to Ukrainian fatalities is at most 1.8 to 2 to 1. This directly contradicts President Zelensky’s public claim of a 5-to-1 ratio. In all likelihood, the actual ratio is even lower than that maximum estimate.

Sources

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