BBC research proves Russia’s confirmed military dead in Ukraine exceeds 100,000
For all the talks about peace, the Russian casualty rate appears to be accelerating.
By Olga Ivshina.
BBC Russian’s work on open source data, in collaboration with Mediazona and a team of volunteers, has identified the names of 103,275 Russian soldiers killed since the launch of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than three years ago.
The Kremlin has been in highly-publicised talks with the Trump administration about a potential peace settlement for the past two months. The rate of attrition, however, has not only failed to slow down, but the volume of published obituaries suggest it is now greater than ever.
Peace negotiations - and despatches from the front line
We took as our starting point for this analysis the visit of President Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff to the Kremlin on February 11th – with the goal of seeing whether the talks have affected the intensity of combat operations in Ukraine in the weeks that followed.
Our inventory of fallen soldiers, each confirmed and identified by name, is updated with an inevitable delay: news of the death of a serviceman can take time to reach the family and appear in open sources; and our ability to process and verify incoming reports is constrained by limited resources.
In addition, time may elapse in some cases before bodies are removed from the battlefield. Attempts to recover the dead can put survivors at risk of falling victim to drone strikes, for example.
We cannot therefore accurately suggest the approximate number of Russian soldiers killed since Witkoff’s first trip to Moscow. But the number of obituaries appearing in the media and other open sources allows us to make an estimate of the intensity of the fighting: since February, an average of 234 death notices have been published each day - a figure one and half times higher than the average for 2024.
Some caveats are in order: the number of obituaries does not necessarily equate to the actual number of soldiers killed. Around 30% of those published turn out to be duplicate reports of the same death, and we also exclude a small number that we cannot verify satisfactorily.
Daniil Alexandrov was among the men killed in battle since the negotiations started. Daniil was an 18-year-old student from the city of Zelenodolsk in Tatarstan. At school, he was a noted athlete, excelling in wrestling, ice hockey and boxing, as well as a regional speed skating champion.
He enrolled in the St. Petersburg University of the State Fire Service of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, but broke his studies a few months into his course to join a unit of Russia’s airborne forces. Daniil was killed in action less than two weeks ago, on April 10th.
In April 2023, the State Duma amended the law to permit high school graduates to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defence. It also allowed for them to be sent to the front line just four weeks after recruitment. A presidential decree specifies that such soldiers have no right to end their contracts until the end of the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine (as the war is known in Russia).
Key Trends
This is what we know about confirmed Russian losses in greater detail:
More than half - 52% - of all identified casualties were men who had no links with Russia’s military at the time the war in Ukraine began.
16% of those killed were prisoners despatched to the front from penal colonies.
12% of the dead were mobilised conscripts.
A quarter – 25% - were volunteers who signed contracts with the Russian military or National Guard (Rosgvardiya) after the invasion began.
Since October 2023, we have witnessed a sharp, steady increase in casualties among volunteer soldiers, while the mortality rate among conscripts remains stable and prisoner deaths are in decline.
One explanation for these trends is that the state is making every effort to send detained men to the front before they even come to trial. Last year, the Duma passed a law enabling the suspension of criminal cases if the accused signs a military contract. In our analysis, such men are classified as volunteer soldiers.
On top of that, competition continues among Russian regions to recruit volunteer soldiers for the fighting by offering ever-larger financial incentives. The average sum is close to two million rubles now – or more than $24,300.
Bashkortostan leads the regions by size of payout – and since September, in the number of confirmed dead, too. At least 4,637 residents of the republic have died at war, and the true number of casualties is certainly higher – the figure includes only those whose names we have been able to confirm through open sources.
Career Military Personnel and Officers
The main battlefield burden now rests upon volunteer units, but career military men remain key participants in the fighting. The group includes those serving in the armed forces at the time of the invasion, or pursuing a professional military career when the war began.
Elite units, such as airborne troops, marines and military intelligence detachments, suffered vast losses in the early stages of the conflict. They are now less exposed to the front line, but are still at times deployed for critical missions, or to flesh out units of inexperienced raw recruits and to maintain operational coordination between branches of the military, especially the artillery.
Only officers are trained for such work – in their absence, poorly prepared assaults result in heavy casualties, on occasion from so-called friendly fire.
Losses among career personnel amount to 17% of the total identified at present. 4,919 of them were officers.
What are the true Russian casualty figures?
Actual deaths are plainly much higher than what open sources alone can establish. The military experts we consulted believe our analysis of Russian cemeteries, war memorials, and obituaries might cover 45% to 65% of the real total of men killed.
That would mean the real number of Russian casualties ranges from 158,885 to 229,500.
The total death toll on the Russian side increases significantly when including those who fought against Ukraine as part of the forces of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk ‘people's republics’.
Donetsk stopped publishing casualty figures in December 2022, while the Luhansk authorities never released them in the first place. Nevertheless, our analysis of death reports from the regions suggest that between 21,000 and 23,500 men may have died from the territories by the close of September last year.
On that basis, the total number of fatalities among pro-Moscow forces ranges from 180,000 to 253,000.
How we derive our calculations
New names of the dead and photographs from funerals are published every day throughout Russia. The identities are disclosed by the heads of Russia’s regions, representatives of district administrations, local media, educational institutions where the deceased had studied, or by relatives.
BBC Russian, Mediazona, and a team of volunteers examine this information and add it to the database we have been compiling since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
We consider death confirmed if it is announced by an official Russian source or the Russian media, or if it is made public by relatives. Other sources are also counted if they are accompanied by photos of the funeral.
Generally we do not include losses by the DNR and LNR “republics”, though if a Russian citizen has volunteered to go to war for such units, we count him.
The kind of military unit concerned is determined either by reports of where the deceased served or by the insignia on his uniform. While conscripts, volunteers and convicts are not separate types of troops, we categorise them independently in order to compare losses against those borne by professional fighting units of the regular army.
Read this story in Russian here.
English version edited by Chris Booth.
Putin did this!
More and more blood on Putin’s hands. And for what purpose?