Counting the Dead... Again: How Many Have Really Died in Ukraine?

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Video originally published on May 30, 2024.

This analysis examines Counting the Dead... Again: How Many Have Really Died in Ukraine? in historical and strategic context. It traces how the core developments unfolded, which institutions and actors shaped outcomes, and what those decisions changed on the ground. Rather than repeating headline-level claims, it focuses on concrete mechanisms, constraints, and tradeoffs that explain the trajectory of events. The discussion moves from Key Developments through Strategic Implications to Risk and Uncertainty, then evaluates wider consequences. The goal is to clarify not only what happened, but why these developments still matter for current planning, risk assessment, and policy decisions.

Key Takeaways

The sort of number that makes you think someone has accidentally added an extra zero, increasing the total by a factor of ten.
To be clear, these are casualty figures rather than deaths. While they include those killed, they also cover the wounded and missing.
This is a question we've tackled before. Nine months ago, we published a video diving deep into the subject.
Although spaced out over ten years, the high death toll caused such fractures in society that Moscow was forced to ultimately withdraw, its war aims unfulfilled.
The promise of freedom after six months has also been scrapped, replaced with contracts that will only expire once the war ends.

Key Developments

The sort of number that makes you think someone has accidentally added an extra zero, increasing the total by a factor of ten. In late-April this year, the British Minister of State for the Armed Forces gave what appeared to be the UK's best estimate for Russian casualties in Ukraine. The figure he quoted? Four hundred and fifty thousand, not including those killed and wounded while serving for private military companies such as Wagner. A couple of weeks later - in May - the French Foreign Minister went one further. According to Paris, Russian military casualties in Ukraine have hit half a million. While they include those killed, they also cover the wounded and missing. So high as to be almost unbelievable. And that got us wondering: is there any way to go beyond the estimates? To maybe come close to understanding the true death toll of Russian forces in Ukraine? This is a question we've tackled before. Nine months ago, we published a video diving deep into the subject. But with three-quarters of a year of fighting having since passed, it's time for an update. And, this time, we won't just be focusing on the death toll among Russian forces… but also among the Armed Forces of Ukraine. (TITLE): The Fog of War Prior to 2022, it was generally understood that the deadliest, most-catastrophic war fought by Moscow since WWII had been the Soviet-Afghan War. Running from 1979 till 1989, it killed 15,000 Soviet troops, and left perhaps another 35,000 wounded. Although spaced out over ten years, the high death toll caused such fractures in society that Moscow was forced to ultimately withdraw, its war aims unfulfilled. We mention this now, because even by the most-conservative estimates, the scale of Russian losses in Ukraine dwarfs those numbers - as it does any other modern war involving Moscow. The two Chechen Wars, for example, are thought to have killed ten thousand on the Russian side. The Russo-Georgian War of 2008 didn't even see the Russian death toll hit triple figures. Now compare that to the Ukraine War. According to the Economist (quote): “By April 2023 Russia had already lost more soldiers by invading Ukraine than it had in all its combined previous wars since 1945.” April 2023, of course, is before some of the bloodiest battles even took place. Before the extremely-deadly campaign to capture Avdiivka. Before Bakhmut even reached its horrific climax. By any sane reckoning, total losses since have likely at least doubled. Yet, precise figures are almost impossible to come by. The Kremlin, for example, has only issued one official death toll - when it claimed a mere 6,000 dead in September of 2022, a laughable undercount even back then. There are, of course, reasons why the Kremlin would want to keep the true figures hidden.

Strategic Implications

To be clear, these are casualty figures rather than deaths. While they include those killed, they also cover the wounded and missing. Still, those are shocking figures. So high as to be almost unbelievable. And that got us wondering: is there any way to go beyond the estimates? To maybe come close to understanding the true death toll of Russian forces in Ukraine? Due to the impact on morale, most states fighting wars try to avoid saying “sorry guys, but just so you know we've suffered catastrophic losses!” Ukraine is also guilty of downplaying its casualties, with President Zelensky recently claiming a mere 31,000 Ukrainian troops have died. The difference, though, is that Ukraine is a relatively open society. Newspapers are free to issue death notices. Municipalities are encouraged to create local memorial lists. That means that anyone with the will and the patience could conceivably sift through multiple sources to reach a somewhat accurate death toll among Ukraine's military - something we'll be looping back to in a later chapter. In Russia, though, such a thing is harder to do. Wartime laws allow the government to block death notices around sensitive battles and high-casualty Ukrainian strikes, making true figures hard to tease out. And there are real consequences for reporting statistics Moscow doesn't like. Back in February, pro-war milblogger Andrey Morozov was found dead of an apparent suicide shortly after publishing casualty figures for the Battle of Avdiivka. As a result, the war's true toll on Russia's people is murky at best. All of which may explain the wild variation among foreign estimates. In spring, the US government briefed that Moscow had suffered over 315,000 casualties, with the death toll perhaps as high as 120,000. In May, French Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné put the figures at half a million casualties, with 150,000 deaths. Elsewhere, the New York Times reports that various Western intelligence agencies put the figure of Russian dead at “well over 100,000.” That's a difference of 50,000 - the difference between a large town's worth of people living or dying. And that's not even considering whether we can trust the Western estimates in the first place. While the figures could easily be accurate, it's not hard to see why countries like the US, UK, and France might have a vested interest in inflating Russian deaths. Although that's not the same as them actually doing so, you might understand why some take the intelligence estimates with a pinch of salt. Luckily, there are other methods for lifting the veil on Russian casualties. Methods that we'll be exploring in the coming chapters. (TITLE): Baseline Of all the attempts to dig into Russian casualties, perhaps none is so valuable as the joint investigation carried out by the BBC and independent Russian outlet Mediazona.

Risk and Uncertainty

This is a question we've tackled before. Nine months ago, we published a video diving deep into the subject. But with three-quarters of a year of fighting having since passed, it's time for an update. And, this time, we won't just be focusing on the death toll among Russian forces… but also among the Armed Forces of Ukraine. (TITLE): The Fog of War Prior to 2022, it was generally understood that the deadliest, most-catastrophic war fought by Moscow since WWII had been the Soviet-Afghan War. Running from 1979 till 1989, it killed 15,000 Soviet troops, and left perhaps another 35,000 wounded. Started in the early days of the conflict - and aided by hundreds of anonymous volunteers - the project aims to create a minimum baseline for the number of Russians killed in Ukraine. Doing so is far from easy. For a dead man's name to make it onto the register, their existence and fate have to be proved beyond all reasonable doubt. That means the database doesn't contain grainy images of dead bodies shot from a distance and counted as a kill. Instead, volunteers comb local Russian media for things like death notices, and monitor social media for postings from grieving family members. Out in the real world, they travel the country to photograph new graves in military cemeteries, and check for names added to small town war memorials. The result is the gold standard list for Russian casualties. If a name appears on there, you can guarantee that it belonged to a real person, that they really went and fought in Ukraine, and that they really died. The flipside, of course, is that the list likely represents a severe undercount - something both the BBC and Mediazona freely admit. Not only is this labor-intensive work that can be limited by multiple factors, but it also only covers those soldiers from Russia itself. Two of the Kremlin's major allies in this war have been the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics - the separatist states that split off from Ukraine in 2014. Although they each supplied tens of thousands of fighters on Putin's side, the project's volunteers are unable to replicate their work in the two pseudo states. As the BBC explains: “If they were added, the death toll on the Russian side would be even higher.” With that in mind, we can now turn to the most up-to-date figure available at time of writing. On their blog, Mediazona last updated the list on May 24th, 2024. On that day, the number of Russian soldiers confirmed dead had reached 54,185. By way of comparison, that's nearly as high as the total number of American military deaths during the Vietnam War. Given we know it's an undercount, the reasonable assumption is that Russia has - in slightly over two years - lost more of its sons in Ukraine than the USA did across almost two decades in Vietnam.

Outlook

Although spaced out over ten years, the high death toll caused such fractures in society that Moscow was forced to ultimately withdraw, its war aims unfulfilled. We mention this now, because even by the most-conservative estimates, the scale of Russian losses in Ukraine dwarfs those numbers - as it does any other modern war involving Moscow. The two Chechen Wars, for example, are thought to have killed ten thousand on the Russian side. The Russo-Georgian War of 2008 didn't even see the Russian death toll hit triple figures. Now compare that to the Ukraine War. According to the Economist (quote): “By April 2023 Russia had already lost more soldiers by invading Ukraine than it had in all its combined previous wars since 1945.” April 2023, of course, is before some of the bloodiest battles even took place. In an article published this April to coincide with their count hitting 50,000, the BBC tried to analyze why the fighting has been so deadly for the Kremlin. Their major conclusion is that it's down to a lack of professional, well-trained soldiers. So catastrophic was the initial run at Kyiv during the war's opening months that many of Russia's most-experienced, most-capable troops were effectively taken off the board. In their place came prisoners, volunteers, and mobilized men with sharply lower levels of ability. As Samuel Cranny-Evans of the Royal United Services Institute told the BBC: “This means they have to do things that are a lot simpler tactically - which generally seems to be a forward assault onto Ukrainian positions with artillery support.” The tactic is known as the “meat grinder” for the astonishing level of casualties it incurs. The BBC explains it this way: “Moscow sends waves of soldiers forward relentlessly to try to wear down Ukrainian forces and expose their locations to Russian artillery.” For this reason, it's the big assaults on fortified cities that send the number of names on this list skyrocketing. Armed with death dates for many of those killed, the BBC report shows three huge spikes: during the Battle for Bakhmut in spring of 2023; during the failed assault on Vuhledar that same year; and during the Battle for Avdiivka a few months ago. Taken together, these three battles are a major part of the reason why the second year of war was deadlier for Russia than the first year. It was also insanely-deadly for Russia's most-infamous units: the Storm-Z battalions composed of prisoners. When Wagner first offered convicts the chance to fight for six months to earn their freedom, the wider world was shocked. Incredibly, it seems today that Wagner's offer was the more-humane one. Since the Russian MOD took over the prisoner battalions, the BBC reports that life expectancy among former inmates fighting in Ukraine has dropped from three months to just two.

The Shocking Casualty Figures: A New Benchmark for Conflict

The promise of freedom after six months has also been scrapped, replaced with contracts that will only expire once the war ends. This is likely a major reason why Putin has so far been able to ride out the impact of over 54,000 dead. Drawn from prisons and Russia's poorest regions, the dead are simply - sadly - not the sort of people the elites in Moscow and St. So, if 54,185 is the bare-minimum number of Russian deaths in Ukraine, what might the real figure be? To answer that, we need to turn to the field of statistical analysis. A field which two independent Russian outlets have used to reach what appears to be a grimly accurate total. (TITLE): Range of Estimates If you watched our original video on Russian losses in August of 2023, you might well remember the collaboration between Mediazona, news platform Meduza, and excess mortality researcher Dmitry Kobak at the University of Tübingen. Mainly because it was so ingenious. Using Russia's Probate Registry, the team were able to track spikes in inheritance claims that went above normal levels. Under Russian law, relatives of the dead have six months to log their claims, which means people are incentivized to do so in a timely manner. At the same time, the near total lack of females fighting among Moscow's forces meant the team could control for other variables that might be causing a spike - such as the lingering effects of covid - since they would affect both genders. Here's how we summed it up last time: “If the spike was only among men, that would suggest something was killing young men, but leaving young women untouched. Something like, say, a gigantic war.” Given that the registry goes back to 2014, and contains more than 11 million individual cases, the team are extremely confident that they've built a workable model. One that's able to filter out background noise and create a likely range of deaths for the Kremlin's forces. Of course, that's only the basic explanation. If you want an in-depth look at the mechanics of it all as written by actual statisticians, an overview is available on the Meduza website. For our purposes, though, it's the headline figure that counts. Updated less-regularly than the BBC recorded name total, the most-recent figures are from March 15th, almost three months ago. But they're still large enough to stop you in your tracks. According to the statistical model, Moscow's forces by that point had suffered around 85,000 deaths. We say “around,” because the figure is just the midpoint in a range that goes from a possible low of 76,000 to a potential high of 98,000.

Historical Context: Understanding the Scale of Modern Warfare

Like the BBC count in the last chapter, it also only covers Russian citizens. That means that - again - militia members from the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics who fought and died for the Kremlin have been excluded. As have men recruited from Central Asian states and places as far afield as Nepal to fight on Russia's side. The figures are also now pretty out of date, although that doesn't necessarily stop us from making an educated stab as to what they are today. When they published a big report on the Probate Registry figures to coincide with the war's second anniversary, Mediazona only had figures up to January 1st, 2024. So, the team simply took a rough monthly death rate of 3,900 for men under fifty in the Russian armed forces, and added it twice to account for the missing months. If we do the same now, that would give us a mid-range of 93,000 dead by the end of May. Obviously, this is a pretty crude method of covering the missing two months' worth of data. Not only does it fail to account for major battles that have happened since - such as around Kharkiv - but it also fails to account for the severe ammo shortages Ukraine experienced around this time. Shortages that may have made it much harder for Kyiv's forces to kill advancing Russians. But even if we stick just with the March figure of 85,000, that's still one hell of a lot of lives lost. To give you just some idea of the scale of death we're talking here, consider this. If you add the total combat deaths among American forces in both Vietnam and the Korean War, you get just over 81,000. Combined, US involvement in those wars covered about twenty-three years. The Ukraine War, by contrast, has been running for slightly over two. The data suggests that the reasons for these staggering figures are the same in the previous chapter. Namely, the use of mobilized men and prisoners in dramatic battles where Moscow won by sheer numerical advantage. During the early push to capture Bakhmut, from January to March 2023, the Probate Registry data shows about 2,000 Russians were dying across the front every single week. When Avdiivka was captured, the number of deaths also jumped. At the time, Russian milblogger Andrey Morozov claimed the battle had killed or wounded as many as 16,000 men. Speaking of which: this data set might be able to tell us more than merely the number of lives lost. It might also be able to tell us how many have been wounded. The method here is especially crude, and shouldn't be taken with as much trust as the death count.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many Russians died in Ukraine 2025?

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What is the biggest cause of death in Ukraine?

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Has Russia's military been weakened?

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Jackson Reed

Jackson Reed creates and presents analysis focused on military doctrine, strategic competition, and conflict dynamics.

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