Vaz based on open data and in its project, the Russian edition of the BBC, together with "Mediazona" and a team of volunteers, identified the names of 68,011 Russian servicemen who died during the invasion of Ukraine. More than half of them were not connected with the army when the war started.
This week, for the first time, the category of military volunteers - those who decided to sign a contract with the Ministry of Defense or the Russian Guard after the full-scale war in Ukraine had already begun - topped the list of the total number of victims.
Every fifth
The names of 13,152 volunteers have already been confirmed - this is 20% of the total number of confirmed losses on the Russian side. For the first time since the beginning of the war, volunteer losses exceeded those of other categories of combatants, including POWs (19% of all confirmed deaths) and mobilized personnel (13%).
Analyzing obituaries and talking to relatives of the deceased, the project concluded that most of those who signed contracts after 2022 did so voluntarily. However, there are known cases where people have been put under pressure. This is especially common among conscript soldiers. There are also known cases when residents of Chechnya agreed to become soldiers in order to avoid harassment by their relatives. Some prisoners in pre-trial detention centers and colonies also testified to threats and pressure.
Newly recruited contract soldiers differ significantly from professional soldiers: for many years before the war they worked in the civilian sector, and before being sent to the front, they underwent training, which in various cases lasted from three to ten days.
Since October 2023, the weekly loss of volunteers has not fallen below 100 people, and in some weeks more than 310 volunteers have died.
Today, volunteers between the ages of 42 and 50 die most often in war, and this group of people is 30% of all casualties. The project registered the oldest deceased volunteer - aged 71, and a total of 209 contract soldiers over the age of 60 died in the war.
Actual casualty figures - both overall and in each specific category - are higher than established figures. The Russian BBC editorial office explicitly states that they rely only on open sources of information, so some deaths are not included in the statistics. The study of thousands of obituaries of the deceased, however, allows us to establish persistent trends.
Planned recruitment
The increase in losses among volunteers is primarily due to the fact that they are now participating in the most difficult sections of the front - in the Donetsk region. They are the basis of the replenishments that the bled parts get.
State structures make great efforts to constantly attract new recruits to the army. In this way, the Russian authorities managed to compensate for losses at the front without announcing a new wave of mobilization.
From the officials' reservations, it follows that there is a top-down plan for recruiting soldiers in the Russian regions. For this purpose, they use job websites, conduct personal conversations with those who have large debts to the state or are given to a bailiff, campaign in universities and technical schools.
The lion's share of the volunteers who now contract with the Russian Ministry of Defense are residents of small towns in regions where it is difficult to find permanent and well-paid work.
Some volunteers lack basic legal literacy and think they can sign a one-year contract with the Ministry of Defense and return to civilian life after 12 months of service. In fact, starting in 2022, all contracts signed with the military are automatically extended until the end of the war.
Thousands of people across Russia are signing contracts with the military to avoid prosecution, an option the State Duma gave suspects as early as 2023. Under the new laws, the case will be permanently dropped if the person under investigation fulfills the contract, dies, receives state award or may leave the armed forces for health reasons.
Now, it is not only those accused of terrorism, treason, sabotage, especially serious and some sexual crimes who are going to war. And all the others are taken to the areas of the so-called special military operation very quickly.
A small part of the dead volunteers are foreigners: the names of 265 dead have been established, most of them from Central Asian countries: Uzbekistan (47), Tajikistan (51) and Kyrgyzstan (26).
In 2023, it became known that citizens of Cuba, Iraq, Somalia and Zambia were successfully recruited for the war, and the authorities of India and Nepal even asked Russia to stop sending their citizens to war, to hand over the bodies of the dead and to return all Nepalese mercenaries who had previously joined the Russian armed forces. So far this has not happened.
Problems with migration status are used by the authorities as a lever to pressure foreigners: they are promised not to be deported from the country in exchange for their agreement to "work for the state", after which they will be able to obtain Russian citizenship under a simplified way - if they survive. Many of them cannot even read the documents they are offered to sign because they do not know the Russian language.
New employees are motivated by high salaries (on average 5-7 times higher than the average salary in the region) and social benefits.
According to Nova Gazeta Europe estimates, during the two years of the war, the average regional payments under contracts concluded with the army increased 80 times.
With the increase of losses at the front, news about the growth of regional payments for signing contracts with the Russian army began to come more and more often from the regions of Russia. According to BBC calculations, this summer 12 regions significantly increased their payments.