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

When Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he was confident Kyiv would fall in no time. Eight years previously, Moscow’s forces had seized Crimea in a nearly bloodless takeover. Six years before that — in 2008 — the Russian army had defeated Georgia after only five days of fighting.

And now that same army was racing towards Kyiv, intending to decapitate the Ukrainian leadership in a lightning-fast strike, one in which it is safe to assume Putin anticipated a low number of Russian casualties, something in the hundreds, maybe only in the dozens. Had the autocrat been able to see the true figure, one has to wonder if he would have gone ahead. Because eighteen months later, no one seriously thinks Russia’s losses in Ukraine have been anything but catastrophic.

While totals vary, all reputable sources believe that — at a bare minimum — tens of thousands of Russians have died. That is a staggering number. But it is also one that raises a question: how are these death tolls calculated?

And how can ordinary people far from the conflict know which totals are accurate?

The Fog of War and Moscow’s Suppression of Casualty Data

When adding up the dead of any war, it is tempting to assume getting the true figure must be easy. After all, even the most incompetent military can tell when soldiers it sent into battle don’t come back. But real life is never simple.

And while both Russia and Ukraine almost certainly have accurate casualty figures, there is little to no chance that either side will share them. Partly, this is for obvious reasons. When fighting a war, commanders need to keep morale high.

And nothing punctures morale quicker than publicizing catastrophic losses. Sometimes it is also because documenting losses can be a technical challenge. In the Ukraine War, for example, Kyiv lists about 23,000 of its own soldiers not as dead, but “missing.”

Some of those men are doubtless alive and being kept prisoner by Russian or Wagner forces. Others presumably fled the battlefield and are now in hiding. But many of them were probably killed in circumstances that make confirming their deaths impossible — when a missile collapsed a building they were in, say, or when a detachment were surrounded in Bakhmut and killed out of sight of their comrades.

Still, for all the reasonable excuses not to publish war deaths, one unreasonable one looms large above all others. In many cases, commanders simply don’t want to. This is especially true on the Russian side.

While Ukraine also doesn’t publish its own casualty figures, the Kremlin has gone further in trying to stop ordinary people from leaking them. Independent Russian outlet Meduza reports that information on the country’s war deaths has been classified. So strict are the criteria that some citizens have even been prosecuted for posting tributes to their dead relatives on social media.

While this ban is enforced haphazardly — not everyone mourning on Telegram gets a knock on the door — it has created a chilling effect which makes it hard to gauge just how many young Russians have vanished into the Ukraine meatgrinder. This chilling effect is likely intentional. Every May, millions of Russians take part in the Immortal Regiment — marching through cities holding photos of relatives who fought in WWII.

In 2023, it was canceled by the Russian authorities. Although security concerns were cited, many Western analysts believed it was due to worries that relatives of those killed in Ukraine would march with photos, thereby illustrating the true death toll. Moscow does have its own official death toll.

Back in September 2022, the Defense Ministry announced that 5,937 Russian troops had been killed in over six months of fighting. Even then, this was thought to be an absurd undercount. After the horrors of Bakhmut and the failed Russian Winter Offensive, it is likely the merest fraction of the true toll.

Yet the number has not been updated. The regime likely fears that the real numbers, if released, would prompt public revolt.

Ukrainian Claims, Pentagon Estimates, and Western Intelligence Assessments

Since the Kremlin refuses to release casualty figures, there are two other sources for ballpark figures: things said by Russia’s opponents, and things accidentally let slip by Russia’s own commanders. Every day, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense publishes an update listing a running total of Russian casualties and equipment losses. On August 9, 2023, it stood at 251,620 — more people than live in Richmond, Virginia.

Of course, this figure comes with two problems. Rather than just deaths, it lists casualties, meaning every soldier taken off the board — whether by dying, being wounded, being captured, or going missing. The second problem is that there is a clear reason for Kyiv to inflate this number, to try and demoralize the Russian side.

For that reason, any numbers supplied by the Ukrainians need to be taken with considerable skepticism. The same attitude should apply to similar claims, such as those that Kyiv has “tens of thousands” of Russian bodies awaiting repatriation. More trustworthy might be the counts supplied by Ukraine’s Western allies, especially those with access to good Russian intelligence, like the United States and the United Kingdom — two of the only countries that accurately called the invasion before it happened.

In early August 2023, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon now estimates 200,000 have died in the war, with casualties “roughly split between the two sides.” If correct, that would mean a vast increase in the number of deaths across 2023. Back when the Pentagon Leaks came to light in spring 2023, American intelligence was claiming in secret briefings that between 35,500 and 43,000 Russians had been killed.

That somewhat chimed with a similar assessment the UK’s MoD offered in February, of between 40,000 and 60,000 dead. An increase to around 100,000 could be consistent with how the war went through 2023. On May 1, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby claimed that 20,000 Russian fighters had been killed in the previous five months, with half of them dying around the ruined city of Bakhmut.

Nonetheless, for all their intelligence-gathering capabilities, the Pentagon and the UK MoD are mostly working through signals interception and statistical analysis. While it is possible they have a high-level mole handing them true death counts, it is also possible that their numbers are inflated or otherwise distorted.

Accidental Admissions: What Russia’s Own Commanders Have Let Slip

While Russia’s official figures are deeply unreliable, the unofficial figures — the ones the Kremlin didn’t want released but which slipped out anyway — are a different story. In some cases, these slips have been deliberate. The mutinous Wagner Group, for example, clearly feels comfortable ignoring the presidential decree classifying casualty lists.

On July 20, 2023, the Wagner Loading Telegram channel — which is said to be connected to Yevgeny Prigozhin himself — published a detailed overview of the capture of Bakhmut. The channel broke down everything from the total number of Wagner fighters involved (78,000) to how many were former prisoners (49,000). More importantly, they included the following: “At the time of the capture of Bakhmut (20 May), 22,000 fighters were killed, 40,000 wounded.”

That is just among Wagner forces involved in a single battle. If they lost that many taking one city, it is hard to believe the rest of the Russian military has seen under 6,000 deaths. More frequently, such statistics have slipped out accidentally.

The Pentagon Leaks claimed to include intercepted data from the FSB, Russia’s notorious security service. According to the files, the FSB had — in early 2023 — counted nearly 110,000 casualties spread between the regular Russian military, Rosgardia, and the Wagner Group. Again, that is casualties rather than deaths, but it is still a jaw-dropping number.

One likely reflected in reported deaths among elite soldiers. In August, the commander of the elite Russian Airborne Forces, Mikhail Teplinsky, released a video intended to celebrate his men’s dedication and sacrifice. He boasted about how 5,000 wounded paratroopers had returned to the front line after treatment, while another 3,500 were wounded but refused to stop fighting.

People quickly realized these figures could be used to estimate a crude death toll for this most elite of Moscow’s forces. Open-source intelligence analyst Kirill Mikhailov told independent media the death toll appeared to run into the “several thousands.” Teplinsky’s video was deleted shortly after.

For historical comparison, in the five-day Russo-Georgian War a mere 64 Russian servicemen were killed. Analyst Michael Kofman has noted that of those, “potentially as many as 40 percent resulted from road accidents on the way to the fight.” The two Chechen Wars killed about 10,000.

The Soviet-Afghan War killed 15,000. Both those totals are still lower than the Wagner Group’s reported death toll around Bakhmut alone.

The BBC-Mediazona Investigation: Individually Documenting Every Death

The joint investigation undertaken by the BBC’s Russian-language service alongside independent outlet Mediazona represents some of the best hands-on reporting on the conflict: an effort to individually document every single Ukraine War death they possibly can. To confirm a death, the BBC and Mediazona rely on a stringent set of criteria. Photographs of bodies — even with accompanying documents — are rejected because they cannot be easily verified.

Claims by the Ukrainian authorities are not enough alone. Instead, the reporters require either an official statement from the Russian military, or statements backed up with photos sourced from the dead person’s local area. This could be mourning posts from friends and relatives on social media, or obituaries published in a local newspaper.

The dead person’s existence and death must be verifiable, and the information about them rock-solid. In many cases, this includes volunteers traveling to cemeteries where the dead are buried to photograph their gravestones. In others, it has involved monitoring war memorials in small towns for new names being added.

Backed by a massive dataset that will be made public once it is safe to do so, the BBC/Mediazona count is currently considered to be the best available. If someone’s name is on that list, they were a real person who really died fighting in Ukraine. The count began because BBC Russian staff knew that otherwise there might never be a trustworthy record of fatalities.

Russia has a history of obscuring its wartime deaths far beyond what is necessary for military secrecy. Years after the Afghan and Chechen wars ended, veterans and relatives are still struggling to get accurate public records of the dead. Accurate counts are not just important for observers and analysts — having confirmation that a relative has been killed can allow family members to access benefits and get closure that the Russian state otherwise denies them.

The BBC/Mediazona project also suffers from limitations, as the organizations themselves acknowledge. The count excludes all those who were fighting for the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics — the separatists in eastern Ukraine on Russia’s side. It also misses many deaths where no publicly available information exists.

As such, it represents not a total, but a bare minimum number of deaths suffered by Russian forces. As of July 28, 2023, Moscow’s forces had suffered a confirmed 28,652 deaths — nearly twice as high as the total number of deaths the USSR suffered in Afghanistan over a much longer timeframe. The data break down those killed by rank and function.

Over 2,300 Russian officers have died in Ukraine, with 280 ranked Lieutenant Colonel or higher. At least 174 military pilots have been killed — Mediazona notes this is a major loss, since training a single pilot can cost over $3 million. The highest percentage (23.5%) of those killed played an unknown role, but among identifiable categories, the highest death toll has been among prisoners recruited by Wagner, accounting for 18.6% of all deaths.

After that, the worst hit are mobilized personnel and then volunteers. Among professional soldiers, the Motorized Rifle forces have fared worst. The BBC has tracked how the profile of those killed changed over the war: the average Russian casualty in the first three months of conflict was a 21-year-old professional soldier.

By mid-2023, it was a 34-year-old ex-prisoner.

The Meduza-Mediazona Statistical Analysis: Counting the Invisible Dead

Working alongside Mediazona and in collaboration with statistician Dmitry Kobak at Tübingen University, independent Russian outlet Meduza used advanced analysis to go beyond the BBC count — to capture the invisible dead that investigation missed. They used tools designed to help estimate excess deaths during a pandemic or natural disaster, tools that were extremely useful just a couple of years ago as Russia routinely obfuscated its Covid death toll. On July 10, 2023, they published the results of their joint study: “We estimate that between 40,000 and 55,000 Russian men under the age of 50 died fighting in Ukraine by May 27, 2023.”

Assuming the correct number is somewhere in the middle, that gives a death toll of roughly 47,000. As Meduza pointed out, that would mean “three times more Russian soldiers died in Ukraine than Soviet troops over 10 years of war in Afghanistan. And nine times more soldiers were killed in Ukraine than in the first Russian-Chechen War between 1994 and 1996.”

In an American context, that is almost level with the total number of combat deaths in the Vietnam War, excluding the roughly 9,000 who died in accidents — and that war lasted for many years. The Ukraine War had yet to breach the two-year mark. Meduza’s first step was to gain access to a vast, restricted database of inheritance cases known as the Probate Registry.

Under Russian law, relatives have six months to claim inheritance from a dead person, otherwise they must fight for it in the courts, meaning relations of dead soldiers are incentivized to log their claims in a timely manner. Per Meduza: “The records we received include more than 11 million individual cases since 2014” — a large enough sample to get a non-random, representative outcome. The method relies on a key fact: unlike on the Ukrainian side, almost no women are fighting for Russia.

The BBC investigation turned up just four confirmed female deaths among Moscow’s forces. The Meduza team could therefore look at inheritance cases among certain age groups and see when claims spiked among both genders or among males only. If both genders spiked, that would suggest another cause, like the lingering effects of the pandemic.

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. Looking at inheritance claims on the property of 20–24-year-olds during the first week of war: “In the first week of the invasion, the average number of cases opened for men skyrocketed to 117 (four times higher than before), while it remained a steady 16 for women.” The journalists concluded: “There is a significant wartime spike in mortality among men that we interpret to be the result of battlefield losses.

While indirect factors like rising violent crime or suicide could have caused some fraction of these cases, long-term trends suggest that the war is overwhelmingly to blame.”

The Disproportionate Toll on Russia’s Poorest Regions and Ethnic Minorities

One thing that has puzzled some Western observers of Russia is how little effect the war’s toll seems to be having on the Putin regime. The deaths of 15,000 servicemen in Afghanistan across a decade shook the Soviet Union. The impact of the Vietnam War reverberated across American culture and society for years.

Yet when reporters venture to modern-day Moscow or St. Petersburg, they see nothing out of the ordinary — nothing to suggest these cities sit at the heart of a nation losing tens of thousands in a brutal and unnecessary war. The figures show that those dying in Ukraine are rarely from Russia’s wealthiest cities.

Rather, they are disproportionately drawn from poorer regions and ethnic minorities. The BBC/Mediazona study lists the full recorded death toll from each region. According to their figures, last updated on July 30, 2023, 273 men from St.

Petersburg have been killed, alongside 229 from the Moscow region. Now compare that to the ethnically Asian Republic of Buryatia. Despite having a population less than a tenth of Moscow, Buryatia has seen 856 of its young men die in Ukraine.

Chelyabinsk has lost 890. Kuban has lost over 1,000. The New York Times broke down some of these differences on a death-per-capita basis: “For every Muscovite who dies in the war, 87.5 people die in Dagestan, Russia’s southernmost republic; 275 people in Buryatia (…) and 350 people in Tuva, home to an Asian minority and the poorest region of Russia.”

In many cases, those in poorer regions are simply more likely to sign up to escape poverty. In Buryatia’s regional capital, Ulan-Ude, the average monthly salary is a pitiful $500. In Moscow, it is closer to $1,200.

Those fighting in Ukraine are offered $2,500 a month, with bonuses available. As one interviewee told the Times: “Money is the main reason people go to fight (…) The contracts being offered volunteers are crazy by our standards.” But the disproportionate death rates among Russia’s minorities are not solely to do with how many rubles are sitting in people’s bank accounts.

There is evidence it is part of a deliberate plan by the Kremlin to shield the white and wealthy from the impact of the war. Looking back at the partial mobilization in fall of 2022, the impacts were felt much more strongly in minority regions. The Diplomat spoke to a leading activist from Kalmykia who complained: “We see the disproportionality with a naked eye… from our [ethnic minority] regions we had three, four times more men taken [than from Slavic regions].”

Given that higher rates of mobilized men have died than any other group except prisoners, higher mobilization rates lead directly to higher death tolls. In the winter of 2022, a community leader from the 100,000-strong population of Nogais warned that two more waves of mobilization would be enough to make his people disappear completely. The wealthier residents of Moscow are able to carry on as though the war is not even happening because it is not their friends, family, and community being fed into the meatgrinder — not their peers dying by the tens of thousands to fulfill one aging autocrat’s dreams of empire.

Sources

1. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/how-many-russian-losses-in-ukraine-b2388643.html
2. https://en.zona.media/article/2022/05/20/casualties_eng
3. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-829ea0ba-5b42-499b-ad40-6990f2c4e5d0
4. https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/07/10/bring-out-your-dead
5. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/06/world/europe/putins-forever-war.html
6. https://www.mil.gov.ua/en/news/2023/08/09/the-total-combat-losses-of-the-enemy-from-24-02-2022-to-09-08-2023/
7. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/08/03/85k-russian-airborne-troops-wounded-in-ukraine-commander-says-a82045
8. https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-ukraine-war-over-20000-wagner-troops-were-killed-prigozhin/
9. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65260672
10. https://thediplomat.com/2022/10/the-war-in-ukraine-is-decimating-russias-asian-minorities/