Journalists confirm deaths of 80,000 Russian soldiers

On the basis of open data, BBC journalists, together with the Mediaphone publication, identified the names of 80,973 Russian soldiers who died during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The details of the Russian Armed Forces’ losses and their chronology were published in a story on the BBC website.

The journalists, supported by a team of volunteers, have been tracking the deaths of the Russian soldiers since the beginning of the Russian invasion, systematizing reports from Russian officials and media, as well as reports from relatives and colleagues of the victims with photos of the graves.

According to updated data, the number of casualties among volunteer soldiers in the Russian army is rapidly increasing. The journalists and volunteers include in this category those who signed a contract with the Russian Ministry of Defense after the outbreak of the war.

“Their share in the total is growing further and now amounts to 22% of the total number of confirmed losses of the Russian side,” the report says. Many volunteers die within two to four weeks of arriving on the front line.

For comparison, according to the publication’s data a year earlier, in November 2023, the volunteers accounted for only 14% of the total number of casualties.

The actual number may be higher, as analysts and volunteers cannot reliably confirm the origin of all the dead. Obituaries of most of them are accompanied by photos of men in civilian clothes. Thus, there is a high probability that they were mobilized to the front or voluntarily signed contracts.

The share of convicts sent to the front from places of imprisonment, on the contrary, is decreasing. In November 2023, they accounted for 26% of all casualties, and now they make up only 18%. However, units composed of prisoners are still deployed on the front line and take on part of the combat load.

Losses of elite Russian units

The publication also separately analyzed the confirmed losses of valuable Russian personnel from professional (contract) units of the regular army to compare them with the total number of losses among mobilized citizens, volunteers and prisoners.

The lists included the soldiers from the elite units of the Airborne Forces, Marines, Special Forces units of the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) and the Special Services (the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation and the Federal Guard Service of the Russian Federation), as well as the pilots of the Russian Aerospace Forces.

The journalists identified the branches of the military by the information in the obituaries about where the deceased served or by the insignia on their uniforms.

The journalists emphasize that the real losses of the Russian army in the Russian-Ukrainian war are higher, as not all reports of Russian military deaths are reported in open sources.

For example, the Goryushko project, analyzing posts by relatives of the victims on social media and obituaries in the media, has already recorded 83240 killed Russian soldiers as of 12:00 on November 29, 2024.