“Journalists, together with volunteers, identified 90,019 Russians who died in the war against Ukraine after the full-scale invasion. 23% of them signed a contract already after the start of hostilities. Source: BBC together with the Russian edition “Mediazona” Verbatim: “For comparison, by November 2023, volunteers accounted for only 14% of the total number of casualties.”, — write: www.pravda.com.ua
Journalists, together with volunteers, identified 90,019 Russians who died in the war against Ukraine after the full-scale invasion. 23% of them signed a contract already after the start of hostilities.
Source: BBC together with the Russian edition “Mediazon”
Literally: “For comparison, by November 2023, volunteers accounted for only 14% of the total number of casualties. The average age of the dead in 2024, according to updated data, was 36 years. This is more than in the first two years of the war.”
Details: In 2025, active campaigns to recruit volunteers for the army continue in Russian regions. For participation in the war against Ukraine, the authorities promise additional payments of up to 2 million rubles on average. According to journalists, this week it became known about the increase in payments in Yamal, the Republic of Mari El and the Primorsky Krai.
As of January 24, 2025, according to the mass media, the most deaths among Russian citizens who fought against Ukraine were recorded in the Republic of Bashkortostan – 3,932 people.
“The real number of dead is higher – these are only those whose names we were able to confirm from open sources,” the BBC notes.
According to research by journalists, more than half of the dead Russians had no military experience before the start of the war. Among all identified casualties, 17% are prisoners who chose to participate in hostilities instead of serving a sentence. Another 12% are mobilized.
One of the least numerous categories of victims are mercenaries of private military companies. At the same time, among the military personnel, who make up 17% of the 90,019 identified persons, the largest losses were experienced by motorized rifle troops (5,931 dead) and paratroopers (3,223 dead).
“The real casualties are obviously much higher than can be ascertained through open sources. The military experts we interviewed suggest that our analysis of Russian cemeteries, war memorials and obituaries may cover between 45% and 65% of the real death toll…the total number of deaths from of pro-Russian forces may be in the range from 159,500 to 223,500 troops,” the material says.
Journalists said that in order to count the number of dead and identify them, they take information from open sources, most often analyzing the statements of heads of regions and administrations, as well as information from funerals.
“We consider a publication in a Russian official source or mass media, publications by relatives or posts in other sources as confirmation of death, if they are accompanied by photographs of the burial,” the mass media reported.
They also emphasized that during the calculation, they did not take into account the soldiers who fought on the side of the self-proclaimed unrecognized republics of the “LDNR”, if the deceased was not a citizen of the Russian Federation and did not voluntarily join the ranks of illegal formations.
We will remind:
- In September, the current president of the United States, Donald Trump, said that the Ukrainian authorities are hiding the number of dead as a result of the war, although he did not explain why, in his opinion, they are doing this.
- The New York Times wrote that Russia continues to suffer huge losses in the war of aggression against Ukraine, in October the number of killed and wounded occupiers was the highest since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, but in the first half of 2024, the Russian Federation managed to mobilize about 900 people every day.
- On January 24, the General Staff of the Armed Forces reported that the total losses of the occupiers in Ukraine in terms of killed and wounded amounted to 826,820 people.