Over 66,000 Russian military soldiers have reportedly killed in the conflict in Ukraine, according to estimates released on Saturday by independent Russian media site Mediazona.
Using open-source data, Mediazona has been compiling a list of known army deaths in collaboration with the BBC Russian Service.
They had previously declared in April that they had discovered the names of almost 50,000 Russians who had died.
“As of August 30, we know the names of 66,471 Russian soldiers killed in the war,” Mediazona stated on Saturday.
It stated that the list had increased by more than 4,600 in the last four weeks, but emphasized that this was not an exact number because many troop deaths are not reported to the public.
Anastasia Alekseyeva, a journalist at Mediazona, stressed that the latest death numbers were “not linked to Ukraine’s offensive in the Kursk region or Russia’s advance in the east”.
This is because researchers are still working through a backlog of death reports, she said.
According to the report, 172 conscripts serving their national duty have died in the conflict, with the biggest numbers occurring in the first few months.
However, Mediazona editor Dmitry Treshchanin noted that these numbers might be inaccurate because conscripts are allowed to sign professional army contracts, and some may have done so without informing family members.
Based on Mediazona’s breakdown, the southern republic of Bashkortostan, home to a sizable Muslim population, has recorded the highest absolute number of deaths (2,578).
33–35 was the age group with the highest representation overall (6,877 deaths).
Over 12,000 of the deceased were prisoners, as Russia attempted to entice detainees by offering them release following a stint on the front lines.
But numbers have dropped recently, Alekseyeva said: “evidently the recruitment drive is not as active”.
Mediazona and the BBC along with volunteers have been counting deaths since February 2022, using open-source information from official reports and the media, as well as using satellite images of Russian cemeteries to estimate the number of new graves.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said in June that almost 700,0000 Russian soldiers were fighting in Ukraine.
The casualties Moscow has suffered in what it refers to as a “special military operation” are seldom discussed.
In September 2022, the Ministry of Defence reported that 5,937 soldiers had lost their lives in combat.
31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died in the first two years of the conflict, according to remarks made by President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in February.
