One of the most guarded secrets amid Russia’s war against Ukraine is the number of casualties suffered by both sides. There are many reasons to believe the toll is very high, including the breadth of the frontline (1,200 kilometres), the number of soldiers deployed (a total of around 1.5 million) and the nature of the fighting, with notably the Russian tactic of launching waves of infantry units against Ukrainian positions. Finally, there are also the civilian victims of Russian strikes on Ukrainian towns.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has to date recorded 14,383 civilian deaths from Russian attacks. But the highest number of deaths by far are those among the military forces, and both the Russian and Ukrainian authorities refuse to divulge a true toll, from fear it would reveal the state of their troops. But they also fear, no doubt with reason, that to reveal accurate figures could fuel a mood of demoralization (among Ukrainian public opinion) and anger (among Russian public opinion).
Both Kyiv and Moscow have, on several occasions, presented tolls but which are impossible to verify in an independent manner, and each side appears to minimise its own losses while exaggerating the losses of the other: six months after the Kremlin launched what President Vladimir Putin called its “special military operation” in February 2022, the Russian government claimed that just fewer than 6,000 of its troops had died in the conflict until then, compared with more than 60,000 Ukrainian losses – a highly improbable ratio of one to ten.
The temptation to exaggerate the other side’s losses is shared by Kyiv, although in more subtle terms. On October 6th this year, the Ukrainian authorities claimed to have discovered the toll of Russian military’s dead, wounded, captured or missing since the beginning of 2025. Photos of documents, in Russian, detailing the information were published on Telegram on a Ukrainian government channel called “I want to live”, set up to encourage Russian soldiers to desert. Announcing “staggering” losses, the channel detailed that “In 243 days, Russia has lost 281,559 people killed, wounded or missing”.
There were reasons to take the announcement seriously, given that the “I want to live” channel had in the past published lists of the names of the dead among certain Russian units which were confirmed by research using open-source information. But after investigation, several specialists advised the October 6th claims should be regarded with great caution.
Among the reasons for this, as highlighted by the Conflict Intelligence Team, a group of researchers using open-source intelligence and founded by Russian opposition figure Rouslan Leviev, are that the document in Russian has an unusual presentation compared to those normally produced by Russia’s defence ministry, and it also contains some statistical anomalies (notably a surprisingly high number of figures ending in “0” and “5”).
Painstaking research reveals extent of the bloodbath
In parallel to these sporadic and questionable official announcements, there are also investigations by journalists, demographers and other specialised researchers to establish, in an independent, transparent and verifiable manner, the death toll of the war launched by Putin. One notable example among these was a report published on October 10th, and which estimates the number of Russian dead, whose identities have been verified, since the war began in February 2022 at 135,100. It also estimates the probable (although unconfirmed) total number of Russian fatalities at 219,000.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
That investigation was led by two exiled Russian media, Meduza and Mediazona, together with the BBC’s Russian-language service, and with the help of data analysis experts, using two methods. One of these was the meticulous, painstaking and exhausting process of tracing the mentions of Russian losses in social media posts, reports in the Russian regional press and also in official publications, and then, after further verifications, entering these into a vast database. “Our criteria for confirming a death are strict,” insists Mediazona, which will only enter a name into its database of the deceased if the social media post, official publication or press report in which it was announced contained sufficient detail, such as a photo, the person’ complete name, and the date of a funeral.
The results of the investigation, which are published online, include a massive gallery of 135,000 names and individual portraits of dead Russian members of the military killed in Ukraine since February 2022. Each portrait includes a link to the publication that refers to the person’s death. The method is solid, but also incomplete. “These figures do not reflect the overall number of deaths because very many deaths are not made public,” Mediazona warns. “That was confirmed on several occasions by our teams of volunteers who visited cemeteries and discovered new victims who were not mentioned in either obituaries or in press reports, nor even on social media.”
Another factor to take into account is that there is often a period of several months between the death of an individual and the process of verification and confirmation by the researchers.
To complete the estimations, the research also involved consultation of the publicly available Russian National Probate Registry, which records all inheritances of assets, from cars to lodgings and land. Of course, the register is not a complete list of Russian deceased given that there are those who leave no assets.
While Meduza estimates the probable true figure of Russian army fatalities between February 2022 and August 2025 at 219,000, the research by the BBC’s Russian service added to that estimation by including the armies of the Russian-controlled, self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk (the oblast was annexed by Russia in 2022) which, when also including overall figures for September 2025, it reports should total between 227,000 and 321,000.
The study also concludes, notably from its research of the Russian National Probate Registry, that the number of Russian fatalities has significantly increased with every year passed. It found that 93,000 Russian military personnel died in 2024, close to twice as many recorded in 2023.
The researchers also estimate that the difference between the numbers of dead and wounded among the Russian and Ukrainian military to be less than claimed by Kyiv – which has advanced a ratio of one in five – and that probably for every Ukrainian in uniform killed or wounded are on average just less than two on the Russian side.
If those estimations are to prove correct, and also by taking into account the Russian siege and destruction of the south-east Ukrainian town of Mariupol, then it would mean that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has led to the deaths of at least 400,000 people.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse