Nearly 50,000 Russian men dead in war in Ukraine: What latest statistical analysis says

Currently, 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.

The war in Ukraine has ravaged for a year and a half at this point, with no end in sight. However, it has already taken a massive toll on both the countries, causing devastation not seen in Europe since the end of World War II.

Calculating excess mortality

The figures given in the report were estimated based on excess mortality, a statistical concept popularised during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Drawing on official inheritance records and mortality data, the researchers estimated how many more men under the age of 50 died between February 2022 and May 2023 than normal.

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. This surge is roughly in line with estimates made by the US and UK intelligence services.

Simultaneously and 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.

Moreover, working with a network of volunteers, the report 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.”

The difficulty of gathering data on the dead

The fog of war obscures many things, casualty numbers included.

“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.,” Treshchanin told AP. “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.”

The COVID-19 pandemic also 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.

However, 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 recognised 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. In fact, it is extremely hard to know how many missing Russian soldiers are actually dead.

“That uncertainty is in the thousands,” Scherbov said, while adding that “the results are plausible overall.”

An act of defiance

Reports about military losses have been repressed in Russian media, activists and independent journalists say. Documenting the dead has become an act of defiance, and those who do so face harassment and potential criminal charges.

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 organisation.” Moscow has also labelled independent outlet Mediazona as a “foreign agent” and blocked its website after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

However, some analysts believe that repressing data on casualties will become ever so harder as the war drags on.

“But hiding losses of this magnitude will only get harder. Wounded soldiers are returning home and telling tales of life and death at the front, and those killed in action have friends and families,” Timothy Frye, a professor of Post-Soviet foreign policy at Columbia University wrote for Foreign Policy.

“As more people learn about the size of losses, support for the war will be harder to sustain,” he said.

(With inputs from AP)