The independent Russian website Mediazona and the BBC Russian service reported on Friday that they had identified some 70,000 Russian soldiers killed since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, an incomplete toll but giving an idea of the scale of Russian losses that the Kremlin keeps secret.
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The count, as of September 19 according to the BBC, comes from the exploitation of public information, such as official press releases, media obituaries or death announcements on social networks, as well as from the observation of graves in cemeteries in Russia.
“We have identified the names of 70,112 Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine, but the real number is likely to be much higher,” the BBC writes.
“Some families do not publicly share details of their loved ones’ deaths, and our analysis does not include names that could not be verified or deaths of militia members from the Russian-occupied Donetsk and Lugansk regions of eastern Ukraine,” the BBC said.
By the end of August, the media outlets had reported that 66,000 Russian soldiers had been killed.
Mediazona and another independent Russian media outlet, Meduza, also analyse the official notarial data available on inheritances, which lead them to estimate that, given the excess mortality recorded over the past two and a half years, the death toll would be at least 120,000.
The Kremlin cited “the law on state secrets” and “the special regime” to justify the lack of official communication on military losses, and in early June, President Vladimir Putin refused to quantify these losses.
Anxious not to demoralize its population, which has been confronted with Russian invasion for more than two and a half years, Ukraine also communicates very little about its losses.
At the end of February, President Volodymyr Zelensky estimated the number of Ukrainian soldiers killed at 31,000, a number that appears to be lower than the reality according to analysts and observers of the conflict.
The American daily newspaper “Wall Street Journal” estimated in an article published on September 17 that the war in Ukraine had caused a total of one million deaths and injuries on both sides.
“A confidential Ukrainian estimate from earlier this year put the number of Ukrainian soldiers dead at 80,000 and the number wounded at 400,000, according to people familiar with the matter. Western intelligence estimates of Russian losses vary, with some putting the number dead at nearly 200,000 and the number wounded at around 400,000,” the newspaper said.
