Journalists and volunteers monitor social media posts and newspaper obituaries, analyze official reports and death records, and search cemeteries for freshly dug graves. Their goal: to create their own picture of the number of casualties in Ukraine, regardless of the official figures of the warring parties or intelligence reports.
How many victims did the journalists count?
According to the latest BBC report on this topic, the number of confirmed Russian soldiers killed now exceeds 70,000, German public broadcaster ZDF recalls. However, the actual number of dead Russians is probably higher, as this number does not include the killed fighters of the various Russian militias in eastern Ukraine.
As part of a large-scale investigation in July, the independent media portals "Meduza" and "Mediazone" estimated the number of Russian soldiers killed by mid-2024 at 120,000. Investigative journalists have analyzed a range of data, including the register of death certificates, the database of inheritance cases, as well as information obtained from relatives of the victims. According to them, this is a "statistical estimate", and the exact figure may reach 140,000. The General Staff of the Ukrainian army even suggests that 180,000 Russian soldiers died, the German publication also writes.
What do Moscow and Kyiv say?
It is difficult to estimate how many soldiers actually fell victim to the war on both sides. In late February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died since the Russian offensive began two years ago. In September, the "Wall Street Journal" reported 80,000 dead and 400,000 wounded Ukrainian soldiers, and Kiev described these numbers as exaggerated.
Moscow does not publish data on its own casualties. In June, President Vladimir Putin said the ratio of "irrecoverable losses" on both sides it is one to five in favor of Moscow - a statement which, however, does not coincide with the assessments of other observers.
What do other sources say?
New NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said in late October that Russian soldiers killed and wounded in Putin's war against Ukraine exceeded 600,000. The Pentagon also talks about 600,000 wounded and killed Russians on the battlefields in Ukraine. In this regard, Patrick Ryder, a major general of the US Air Force, points out that in the first year of the war in Ukraine alone, the number of Russians killed exceeded Russian and Soviet losses in all conflicts since the end of World War II, it is also said in the ZDF publication.
"Frankfurter Rundschau" on the same topic, he recalls that September 2024 was the month with the most Russian casualties since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. The publication cites British military intelligence, according to which an average of 1,271 Russian soldiers were killed or seriously wounded per day in Ukraine. The Ukrainian General Staff claims that Russian losses remain high in October as well - well over a thousand people per day on average. The total number of Russian losses - killed and wounded - reached 692,080 people, this information also said. However, these data cannot be confirmed by independent sources, the publication says.
Military expert Colonel Wolfgang Richter of the Center for Security Policy in Geneva believes that the figures on the number of victims are rather exaggerated. Also another military expert - Matthew Ford from the Swedish Defense College Försvarshögskolan – doubts the credibility of the numbers. As the loss figures are always heavily politically influenced, they should be approached with a certain amount of caution, he assures, quoted by ZDF.
Emilian Lilov (editor)