Ukraine invasion has cost Russia 50,000 fighters, says data

How many fighters has Russia lost since invading Ukraine? The first independent statistical analysis of Russia’s war dead has put the figure at a whopping nearly 50,000.

Two independent Russian media outlets, Mediazona and Meduza, working with a data scientist from Germany’s Tubingen University, have used Russian government data to shed light on one of Moscow’s closest-held secrets.

They relied on a statistical concept popularised during the COVID-19 pandemic called excess mortality.

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Drawing on inheritance records and official mortality data, they estimated how many more men under age 50 died between February 2022, when the invasion began, and May 2023 than normal.

Hazy figures

Neither Moscow nor Kyiv gives timely data on military losses. Each is at pains to amplify the other side’s casualties.

Russia has publicly acknowledged the deaths of just over 6,000 soldiers. Reports about military losses have been repressed in Russian media.

Documenting the dead has become an act of defiance, and those who do so face harassment and potential criminal charges.

Despite such challenges, Mediazona and the BBC’s Russian Service, working with a network of volunteers, used social media postings and photographs of cemeteries across Russia to build a database of confirmed war deaths.

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As of July 7, they had identified 27,423 dead Russian soldiers.

“These are only soldiers who we know by name, and their deaths in each case are verified by multiple sources,” said Dmitry Treshchanin, an editor at Mediazona who helped oversee the investigation.

“The estimate we did with Meduza allows us to see the hidden deaths, deaths the Russian government is so obsessively and unsuccessfully trying to hide,” he added.

Other records

Journalists from Mediazona and Meduza obtained records of inheritance cases filed with the Russian authorities.

Their data from the National Probate Registry contained information about more than 11 million people who died between 2014 and May 2023.

According to their analysis, 25,000 more inheritance cases were opened in 2022 for males aged 15 to 49 than expected. By May 27, 2023, the number of excess cases had shot up to 47,000.

That surge is roughly in line with a May assessment by the White House that more than 20,000 Russians had been killed in Ukraine since December, though lower than US and UK intelligence assessments of overall Russian deaths.

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In February, the U.K. Ministry of Defense said approximately 40,000 to 60,000 Russians had likely been killed in the war.

A leaked assessment from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency put the number of Russians killed in action in the first year of the war at 35,000 to 43,000.

Assessing casualties

“Their figures might be accurate, or they might not be,” Treshchanin, the Mediazona editor, said in an email. “Even if they have sources in the Russian Ministry of Defense, its own data could be incomplete.”

Casualties among inmates, first recruited by Wagner and now by the MoD, are also a very hazy subject, with a lot of potential for manipulation.

Russians who are missing but not officially recognized as dead, as well as citizens of Ukraine fighting in units of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics, are not included in these counts.

(With agency inputs)