Five hundred and two days into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, how many of Vladimir Putin’s troops have died in Ukraine?
In February, the British defense ministry estimated that between 40,000 to 60,000 Russians had been killed in the war’s first year, while a leaked U.S. assessment gave a lower figure – between 35,000 and 43,000.
Now, a statistical analysis of Russian administrative and public health data has shown that 47,000 Russian men likely died fighting in Ukraine between February 2022 and May 2023.
The independent Russian news organizations, Mediazona and Meduza, teamed with Dmitry Kobaka, a data scientist at Germany’s Tübingen University, used Russian government data to shed light on one of Moscow’s closest-held secrets — the true human cost of its invasion of Ukraine.
To do so, they relied on a statistical concept popularized during the COVID-19 pandemic called excess mortality. Drawing on inheritance records and official mortality data, they estimated how many more men under age 50 died between February 2022 and May 2023 than normal.
Both Russia and Ukraine have kept a tight lid on their casualty numbers. The same leaked U.S. document to estimate 43,000 Russian war dead also pegged Ukrainian deaths at 17,000.
The Mediazona and Meduza investigators pored through Russian inheritance records and official mortality data to estimate “excess deaths” among men under 50, or the number of dead beyond a typical level of mortality.
They started with a baseline of 27,423 war deaths that Mediazona and the BBC’s Russian Service had verified through a network of volunteers who sifted through tens of thousands of social media posts and photographs of cemeteries.
“These are only soldiers who we know by name, and their deaths in each case are verified by multiple sources,” Dmitry Treshchanin, an editor at Mediazona who helped oversee the investigation, told the Associated Press.
“The estimate we did with Meduza allows us to see the ‘hidden’ deaths, deaths the Russian government is so obsessively and unsuccessfully trying to hide.”
To come up with a more comprehensive tally, journalists from Mediazona and Meduza obtained records of inheritance cases filed with the Russian authorities. Their data from the National Probate Registry contained information about more than 11 million people who died between 2014 and May 2023.
According to their analysis, 25,000 more inheritance cases were opened in 2022 for males aged 15 to 49 than expected. By May 27, 2023, the number of excess cases had shot up to 47,000.
That surge is roughly in line with a May assessment by the White House that more than 20,000 Russians had been killed in Ukraine since December, though lower than U.S. and U.K. intelligence assessments of overall Russian deaths.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told AP on Monday that he hadn’t seen the report on Russian war deaths, and he refused to say how many Russian personnel had died in the war. “The Defense Ministry gives the numbers, and they’re the only ones who have that prerogative,” Peskov said.
The Russian government hasn’t released casualty figures since September 2022, when defense minister Sergei Shoigu said that 5,937 soldiers had been killed in action.
Meduza is an independent Russian media outlet that has been operating in exile for eight years, with headquarters in Riga, Latvia. In April 2021, Russian authorities designated Meduza a “foreign agent,” making it harder to generate advertising income, and in January 2023, the Kremlin banned Meduza as an illegal “undesirable organization.”
Moscow has also labeled independent outlet Mediazona as a “foreign agent” and blocked its website after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
