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120k dead and counting A new estimate from Meduza and Mediazona

In the latest update to their list of confirmed Russian military deaths, Mediazona and BBC News Russian reported that at least 56,585 Russian soldiers have died fighting in Ukraine as of June 21. However, this list only includes soldiers whose deaths could be individually corroborated through open sources such as obituaries. In a previous investigation, Meduza and Mediazona used inheritance case data to estimate Russia’s losses and determined that 75,000 Russian soldiers had died in Ukraine as of the end of 2023. But collecting and analyzing data from the National Probate Registry takes significant time and resources, and this means that our true mortality estimates come much less frequently than our colleagues’ updates to the list of confirmed deaths. To address this problem, we’ve devised a new method for estimating Russia’s true military death toll at any given time with a reasonably high level of accuracy. These “flash estimates” will now accompany updates to Mediazona and BBC Russian’s confirmed deaths list as well as Meduza’s own reports on casualties. According to our latest calculations, as of the end of June, approximately 120,000 Russian servicemen have died in the war since 2022, but the real number could be as high as 140,000.

But collecting and analyzing data from the National Probate Registry takes significant time and resources, and this means that our true mortality estimates come much less frequently than our colleagues’ updates to the list of confirmed deaths. But if we’re only calculating the total number of deaths, rather than weekly figures, the delays don’t make a significant difference — at least until the volunteers’ methodology or the social makeup of the dead soldiers changes. Because of the time it takes to find and verify individual deaths, we don’t know how this rate has changed in the last few weeks, but Russia’s total number of recent losses undoubtedly exceeds even those from the Battle of Bakhmut, where about 21,000 soldiers were estimated to have died.

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