Nearly 50K Russian men have died in Ukraine war, nearly 9x larger than Russia’s official figure: new study

A new independent statistical analysis has found nearly 50,000 Russian men have died in the war in Ukraine, a figure nearly nine times larger than the Russian government is reporting in the conflict, which has lasted more than 500 days.

While Russia has publicly acknowledged the deaths of just over 6,000 soldiers, two independent Russian media outlets, Mediazona and Meduza, working with a data scientist from Germany’s Tübingen University, found the true human cost of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is up to at least 47,000 as of May 2023.

The first independent review also puts the death total well under Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry’s official tally, which claims Russia has lost about 234,000 troops in the war, as of July 10. In May 2023, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry reported approximately 207,000 Russian troop deaths.

The Russian government has kept its personnel losses a tight secret during its invasion of the much smaller neighboring country, in a likely effort to justify the lengthy and expensive fight and to keep its soldiers’ morale high.

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The new study used a statistical concept popularized during the COVID-19 pandemic called excess mortality combined with data from the Russian government to provide a more accurate picture of Russia’s losses.

Mediazona and the BBC’s Russian Service, working with a network of volunteers, used social media postings and photographs of cemeteries across Russia to identify and confirm 27,423 dead Russian soldiers between 2022 and 2023.

“These are only soldiers who we know by name, and their deaths in each case are verified by multiple sources,” Dmitry Treshchanin, a Mediazona editor who helped the investigation, told The Associated Press. “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.”

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While Mediazona is a Russian news outlet, Moscow has labeled it a “foreign agent.”

The Mediazona and Meduza journalists sought a more comprehensive tally and used inheritance case data from the National Probate Registry.

They found 25,000 more inheritance cases were opened in 2022 for males aged 15 to 49 than expected. That figure shot up to 47,000 by May 27, 2023.

That surge nearly matched a May assessment from the White House that more than 20,000 Russians had been killed in action in Ukraine from December 2022 to May 2023.

The 47,000 total also falls between official estimations from the U.K. and U.S. governments.

In February, the U.K. Ministry of Defense said the war likely saw approximately 40,000 to 60,000 Russian deaths. A leaked assessment from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency determined the number of Russians killed in the first year of the war was 35,000 to 43,000.

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Treshchanin cautioned Mediazona’s new independent estimate uses data from the Russian government which could be “incomplete.”

“Their figures might be accurate, or they might not be,” Treshchanin said in an email to AP. “Even if they have sources in the Russian Ministry of Defense, its own data could be incomplete. It’s extremely difficult to pull together all of the casualties from the army, Rosgvardia, Akhmat battalion, various private military companies, of which Wagner is the largest, but not the only one. 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. Statistics could actually give better results.”

Dmitry Kobak, a data scientist from Germany’s Tübingen University who has published work on excess COVID-19 deaths in Russia, used mortality data broken down by age and sex and found a figure that aligns with the analysis of inheritance data.

Kobak also cautioned that uncertainties remain, especially for older male populations who may have died to other factors, such as COVID, but are included in the fatality data. Their inclusion is not likely to sway the larger findings, he added

“That uncertainty is in the thousands,” he told AP. “The results are plausible overall.”

The independent analysis did not include Russians who are missing but not officially recognized as dead. It also did not recognize citizens of Ukraine who are fighting on behalf of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics, who support Russia.

Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. It crossed 500 days on July 8. 

The Associated Press contributed to this report.