BRUSSELS (AP) — Nearly 50,000 Russian men have died in the war in Ukraine, according to the first independent statistical analysis of Russia’s war dead.
Two independent Russian media outlets, Mediazona and Meduza, working with a data scientist from Germany’s Tubingen 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.
Neither Moscow nor Kyiv gives timely data on military losses, and each is at pains to amplify the other side’s casualties. Russia has publicly acknowledged the deaths of just over 6,000 soldiers. Reports about military losses have been repressed in Russian media, activists and independent journalists say. Documenting the dead has become an act of defiance; those who do so face harassment and potential criminal charges.
Despite such challenges, Mediazona and the BBC’s Russian Service, working with a network of volunteers, have used social media postings and photographs of cemeteries across Russia to build a database of confirmed war deaths. As of July 7, they had identified 27,423 dead Russian soldiers.
"These are only soldiers who we know by name, and their deaths in each case are verified by multiple sources," said Dmitry Treshchanin, an editor at Mediazona who helped oversee the investigation. "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." |