If you do this rather morbid math, you can still find some kind of rhyme and reason, says Jonas Kjellén.
It is, among other things, Ukraine's Defense Ministry publishing statistics on how many enemy soldiers are "eliminated" per day. The figures include both killed, wounded, and captured, and have risen sharply since the large-scale invasion in early 2022 – from around 200 per day two years ago to around 2,000 now.
Ukraine-friendly bloggers and journalists describe it as a military bloodbath on a scale that is hardly comparable to any other modern war.
Russia rarely publishes figures, and it is very difficult to assess what is true. But Jonas Kjellén, a military analyst at FOI, says that you can compare with a running project by the British BBC and independent Russian Mediazona, which registers deaths based on obituaries and other open sources.
They say 77,000. That's how many individuals they've found in the form of obituaries and such.
Deliberate strategy
Since such statistics become very fragmented, Kjellén emphasizes that in military contexts, it is reasonable to assume that the actual number of dead is roughly double. And a common rule of thumb in war is that for every dead soldier, 3-4 are wounded.
Then you land on a total number of at least around 600,000 Russian soldiers who, in Ukrainian terminology, have been "eliminated".
They (Ukraine) say 100,000 more, around 716,000. But if you do this rather morbid math, you can still find some kind of rhyme and reason, says Kjellén.
He sees the many fallen as a deliberate strategy from the Moscow regime.
The choice from the military leadership in Russia appears to be to take small pieces of terrain in the east at a very high price.
Volunteers and prisoners
When you look at it from the outside and wonder how Russia can handle this, Kjellén warns against a common mistake.
You must not make the mistake of thinking that the losses we see are so high that they should be directly deducted from Russia's regular forces.
That was the case at the beginning of the war. But now, many of the fighters come from private armies like the notorious Wagner, volunteers lured by high bonuses, and prisoners lured by commuted sentences.
This also makes the Russian public opinion less outraged.
I think there is a general image that those who sign contracts are those who have voluntarily chosen this. Even more cynical is when you use prisoners, says Kjellén.
They are people who do not have much human value in Russia.
