Almost 1.1 million Russian soldiers have been "eliminated" in the war, according to the Ukrainian military. By "eliminated" is meant both killed soldiers and injured who are not expected to be able to return to the battlefield.
The parties to the war provide regular but difficult-to-verify updates on the other side's losses. Neither Russia nor Ukraine is transparent about the death toll in their own ranks.
Graves and runes
Instead, independent attempts are being made to count or estimate how many have fallen so far in the more than three and a half years of war.
The Russian exile media site Mediazona and the British BBC have in a joint investigation been able to identify more than 130,000 Russian soldiers who have fallen (up to and including September 12). Then, each individual soldier has been identified by name and the deaths have been tracked through open source information: local media reports, graves, testifying relatives, and more.
When Mediazona and Meduza, another opposition Russian media site, investigate the number of legal proceedings initiated in Russia to have soldiers declared dead or to receive inheritance, they also note an excess mortality. Based on this, they calculate that the total number of fallen should be at least 219,000. In addition, it is likely that several times as many have been injured – and a constantly growing number of dead who have not yet been fully identified.
Over- and underestimates
Intelligence services in the West and many analysts have since last summer estimated that Russian losses – killed and injured – are likely to exceed one million.
Ukraine has also paid a high price in the Russian invasion war – tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of soldiers have fallen on that side as well. In Russian propaganda media, it is claimed that as many as 1.7 million Ukrainians have been killed or injured, but there are no other reports that support this.
At the end of last year, President Volodymyr Zelenskyj admitted that 43,000 soldiers had fallen by then. Already then, many more than that had been killed, according to most independent assessments, although Russia's death toll appears to be higher.
