BRUSSELS — Nearly 50,000 Russian men have died in the war in Ukraine, according to the first independent statistical analysis of Russia’s war dead.
Two independent Russian media outlets, Mediazona and Meduza, working with a data scientist from Germany’s Tübingen University, used Russian government data to shed light on one of Moscow’s closest-held secrets — the true human cost of its invasion of Ukraine.
Update: Full article in comments seperated also link to meduza in English
FULL ATRTICLE ( by popular demand):
BRUSSELS — Nearly 50,000 Russian men have died in the war in Ukraine, according to the first independent statistical analysis of Russia’s war dead.
Two independent Russian media outlets, Mediazona and Meduza, working with a data scientist from Germany’s Tübingen University, used Russian government data to shed light on one of Moscow’s closest-held secrets — the true human cost of its invasion of Ukraine. To do so, they relied on a statistical concept popularized during the COVID-19 pandemic called excess mortality. Drawing on inheritance records and official mortality data, they estimated how many more men under age 50 died between February 2022 and May 2023 than normal.
Neither Moscow nor Kyiv gives timely data on military losses, and each is at pains to amplify the other side’s casualties. Russia has publicly acknowledged the deaths of just over 6,000 soldiers. Reports about military losses have been repressed in Russian media, activists and independent journalists say. Documenting the dead has become an act of defiance; those who do so face harassment and potential criminal charges.
Despite such challenges, Mediazona and the BBC’s Russian Service, working with a network of volunteers, have used social media postings and photographs of cemeteries across Russia to build a database of confirmed war deaths. As of July 7, they had identified 27,423 dead Russian soldiers.
“These are only soldiers who we know by name, and their deaths in each case are verified by multiple sources,” said Dmitry Treshchanin, an editor at Mediazona who helped oversee the investigation. “The estimate we did with Meduza allows us to see the ‘hidden’ deaths, deaths the Russian government is so obsessively and unsuccessfully trying to hide.”
To come up with a more comprehensive tally, journalists from Mediazona and Meduza obtained records of inheritance cases filed with the Russian authorities. Their data from the National Probate Registry contained information about more than 11 million people who died between 2014 and May 2023.
According to their analysis, 25,000 more inheritance cases were opened in 2022 for males aged 15 to 49 than expected. By May 27, 2023, the number of excess cases had shot up to 47,000.
That surge is roughly in line with a May assessment by the White House that more than 20,000 Russians had been killed in Ukraine since December, though lower than U.S. and U.K. intelligence assessments of overall Russian deaths.
In February, the U.K. Ministry of Defense said approximately 40,000 to 60,000 Russians had likely been killed in the war. A leaked assessment from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency put the number of Russians killed in action in the first year of the war at 35,000 to 43,000.
“Their figures might be accurate, or they might not be,” Treshchanin, the Mediazona editor, said in an email. “Even if they have sources in the Russian Ministry of Defense, its own data could be incomplete. It’s extremely difficult to pull together all of the casualties from the army, Rosgvardia, Akhmat battalion, various private military companies, of which Wagner is the largest, but not the only one. Casualties among inmates, first recruited by Wagner and now by the MoD, are also a very hazy subject, with a lot of potential for manipulation. Statistics could actually give better results.”
Many Russian fatalities - as well as amputations - could have been prevented with better front-line first aid, the U.K. Ministry of Defense said in an intelligence assessment published Monday. Russia has suffered an average of around 400 casualties a day for 17 months, creating a “crisis” in combat medical care that is likely undermining medical services for civilians in border regions near Ukraine, the ministry said.
Independently, Dmitry Kobak, a data scientist from Germany’s Tübingen University who has published work on excess COVID-19 deaths in Russia, obtained mortality data broken down by age and sex for 2022 from Rosstat, Russia’s official statistics agency.
He found that 24,000 more men under age 50 died in 2022 than expected, a figure that aligns with the analysis of inheritance data.
The COVID-19 pandemic made it harder to figure out how many men would have died in Russia since February 2022 if there hadn’t been a war. Both analyses corrected for the lingering effects of COVID on mortality by indexing male death rates against female deaths.
Sergei Scherbov, a scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, cautioned that “differences in the number of deaths between males and females can vary significantly due to randomness alone.”
“I am not saying that there couldn’t be an excess number of male deaths, but rather that statistically speaking, this difference in deaths could be a mere outcome of chance,” he said.
Russians who are missing but not officially recognized as dead, as well as citizens of Ukraine fighting in units of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics, are not included in these counts.
Kobak acknowledged that some uncertainties remain, especially for deaths of older men. Moreover, it’s hard to know how many missing Russian soldiers are actually dead. But he said neither factor is likely to have a huge impact.
“That uncertainty is in the thousands,” he said. “The results are plausible overall.”
Asked by the Associated Press on Monday about the Meduza and Mediazona study, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said during a conference call with reporters he wasn’t aware of it as the Kremlin had “stopped monitoring” Meduza. Peskov also refused to comment on the number of deaths mentioned in the study, saying only that “the Defense Ministry gives the numbers, and they’re the only ones who have that prerogative.”
Meduza is an independent Russian media outlet that has been operating in exile for eight years, with headquarters in Riga, Latvia. In April 2021, Russian authorities designated Meduza a “foreign agent,” making it harder to generate advertising income, and in January 2023, the Kremlin banned Meduza as an illegal “undesirable organization.”
Moscow has also labeled independent outlet Mediazona as a “foreign agent” and blocked its website after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
—
Dasha Litvinova contributed to this report from Tallinn, Estonia.
How many Ukrainians have died?
Too many, they are just trying to defend their home from aggressors.
The methodology used here is specifically tied to Russia and cannot be used on Ukraine.
That doesn’t seem like an accurate statement at all. The methodology they used looks like it could be applied to any country that has public its analgous National Probate Registry. I’m not going to bother to check, but I’d be surprised if Ukraine didn’t also have this. So in theory, the exact same analysis could be used on Ukraine.
But it depends on how accurate and accessible their data stack is. Bureaucracy can make wild difference even with identical institutions, even inside one nation. I mean if it is possible, go ahead.
The methodology used here is specifically tied to Russia and cannot be used on Ukraine.
You said it’s specific to Russia and cannot be used on Ukraine. It is not specific to Russia, and whether it could be used on Ukraine or not is, as you now say, dependent on data accessibility. I was pointing out that your original comment was not accurate.
Somewhere between 9000 and 42000 civilians depending on estimates, and probably 20000-30000 military, again depending on estimates.
Do you have any sources for these estimates?
I pulled them from the table at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War#Total_casualties which seems to be kept fairly up-to-date with the reasonably credible claims, including the Meduza estimates. Original references are in the Wikipedia article.
I added the 30000 upper bound as a fudge for the Ukrainian military deaths because the one somewhat credible estimate from the US that table lists only covers up to May 2023. While Ukraine has been on the offensive since then, I don’t think increasing the KIA numbers by more than 50% in 2 months is credible even under the circumstances.
they don’t want to talk about that.
If pro-Russian media come up with a decent methodology to independently estimate Ukrainian losses, then I’m sure some discussion can be had around that.
Don’t expect the opposition to do the work for you.
Any pro-Russia or pro-China news outlet gets labeled as “propaganda”, there will not be any discussion.
US-propaganda is OK though.
Most Fediverse users are Western. The Western world has plenty of media diversity, and you can find virtually every viewpoint you can imagine represented there. Open criticism of government, all the way to the top, is a normal part of everyday life, and media outlets regularly criticise each other, and themselves, for bad takes and poor journalism.
Because of the diversity of media opinion, it is harder to push an agenda, so mainstream Western media does it, by and large, with substantial subtlety, building trust first, and seeding ideas over long periods of time.
Russian and Chinese media aimed at a Western audience seems brash and full of bad takes by comparison. It is rarely, if ever, critical of itself or of its own government, and also rarely provides any independently verifiable evidence for its claims. To a Western audience used to Western media, it appears so one-sided that it is laughable. That is why it is easy for people in the West to dismiss it as propaganda.
You could probably write a PhD thesis on why media outlets in China and Russia find it difficult to play the Western media game, but I think the main issue is this: If you live in a society that doesn’t itself value diversity of opinion and thought, it is difficult to produce media for a society that does value that without it seeming off-kilter. It’s a bit like the difference between being fluent in another language and “feeling” the language. To a native speaker listening to it, the difference is really obvious.
Anyone have a non-paywalled version? It would be nice if you would post the entire article contents as post body if you’re going to post paywalled sources, @[email protected].
Good suggestion: done that 👍🏼
How many Russians have died in Ukraine? Data shows what Moscow hides
Huh. I’m getting a ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH error on that link. I was getting the same error when I tried to do it myself with archive.is (archive.ph is down and I get a cloudflare page).
It’s American propaganda and you’re complaining about capitalism?
do you have any reason to believe that meduza, a news site run by russians from latvia, and medizona, also run by russians, is american propaganda besides ‘theyre not pro russian government’
You guys are the ones saying everything that comes from Russia is propaganda!
can you cite the specific comment where i said everything that comes from russia is propaganda
This is the washingtonpost, are you blind?
Two independent Russian media outlets, Mediazona and Meduza, working with a data scientist from Germany’s Tübingen University, used Russian government data to shed light on one of Moscow’s closest-held secrets — the true human cost of its invasion of Ukraine.
its literally the second sentence in
