The list has increased by more than 4,600 in the past four weeks (representative)
Moscow:
Independent Russian media outlet Mediazona said on Saturday that it estimates more than 66,000 Russian soldiers have been killed during the war in Ukraine.
Mediazona, in collaboration with the BBC Russian Service, has compiled a list of known soldier deaths, using open source data.
Earlier in April, they announced that they had found more than 50,000 names of Russians killed.
Mediazona said on Saturday that “as of August 30, we know the names of 66,471 Russian soldiers who died in the war.”
The list has increased by more than 4,600 in the past four weeks, the report says, while stressing that this is not a final figure because the deaths of many soldiers are not made public.
Anastasia Alekseyeva, a journalist at Mediazona, stressed that the latest death figures were “not related to the Ukrainian offensive in the Kursk region or the Russian advance in the east.”
This is because investigators are still working through a backlog of death reports, she said.
The report shows that 172 conscripts died during the war, with the highest figures in the first months.
However, these figures may be inaccurate as conscripts can sign professional army contracts and some may have done so without informing their relatives, said Mediazona editor Dmitry Treshchanin.
According to Mediazona’s analysis, the region with the largest absolute number of deaths – 2,578 – is the southern republic of Bashkortostan, which has a large Muslim population.
The most represented age group was 33-35 years in total (6,877 deaths).
More than 12,000 of those killed were prisoners, after Russia tried to recruit prisoners by promising them freedom after a stint on the front lines.
But the numbers have dropped recently, Alekseeva said: “apparently the recruitment drive is not so active.”
Mediazona and the BBC, together with volunteers, have been counting deaths since February 2022, using open source information from official reports and the media, and satellite images of Russian cemeteries to estimate the number of new graves.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said in June that nearly 700,000 Russian soldiers were fighting in Ukraine.
Moscow rarely talks about the losses it suffered in what it calls a “special military operation.”
The Defense Ministry said in September 2022 that 5,937 soldiers had been killed in the battle.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in February that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in the first two years of the war.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
