How many Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine?

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Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war here.

VLADIMIR PUTIN, Russia’s president, is yet to give a realistic figure for the number of his compatriots killed during his faltering war in Ukraine. But soldiers who die tend to leave two valuable things behind: memories and money. An investigation published on July 10th by Meduza and Mediazona, two independent Russian media outlets, have used these to provide a fresh estimate of how many Russian soldiers have been killed. They have scoured obituaries, in local and social media, and analysed official inheritance records.

These records go some way to revealing the number of deaths. But not every soldier who dies in Ukraine will own property or valuable possessions, or have someone to leave them to. The estimate, therefore, is calculated by cross-referencing these cases with some 27,000 obituaries verified by Mediazona and the BBC Russian service. Meduza and Mediazona could thus estimate how many dead Russian soldiers there are for each one who leave an official record of their inheritance. They then calculated how many excess inheritance cases there had been among men since February 2022, compared with historical trends. A combination of these proxies gives a final estimate for the number of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine: between 40,000 and 55,000, by May 27th.

This is lower than some other estimates. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank, put the number at 60,000 to 70,000 in the first year of the invasion alone. But the estimates do align with deaths recorded by Rosstat, the Russian statistical agency, and the excess deaths they imply for last year (according to calculations by Dmitry Kobak, a researcher based in Germany). Although this data ends in 2022, the totals for that year are similar even when broken down by age group, as our chart shows.

Analysts reckon that for each person killed there are at least three or more sufficiently wounded to be taken out of action. By that logic, 200,000 Russian soldiers would have been killed or wounded in Ukraine. As the number rises, Mr Putin will need more men to fight their neighbours, and may find that increasingly difficult.■