An electronic screen displays an advertisement calling for military conscription featuring images of Russian soldiers in Moscow, Russia, 26 August 2025. EPA/MAXIM SHIPENKOV
Around 220,000 Russian servicemen between the ages of 18 and 55 had now died in the war, according to the latest calculations made by independent media outlets Mediazona and Meduza based on data from the probate registry.
Losses reached record levels in 2024, Meduza said on Friday, with periods when Russia was losing over 2,000 people a week. “About 93,000 Russian servicemen were killed last year in all, according to the probate registry, almost twice as many as in 2023, when casualties amounted to about 50,000 personnel,” the outlet continued.
Another source of data used in the report has been the requests to courts to have servicemen declared dead or missing in action. By early August, the courts had received about 50,000 such cases, and are currently declaring over 250 people missing or dead every day, comparable to the daily number of deaths at the front.
This death toll is almost twice as high as another estimate — a list of dead soldiers whose names have been recorded which is regularly being updated by Mediazona, BBC Russian Service and a team of volunteers. The reason for the difference is that not all data on those killed is publicly available. That register currently lists the number of Russian personnel killed in the war in Ukraine as close to 126,000.
Official data on Russian casualties has remained incredibly scarce throughout the three years of war, with the last official Russian death toll of 5,937 announced by former Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu in September 2022.
