How many Russian soldiers died in the war with Ukraine

Russian losses in the war with Ukraine.
Mediazona count, updated

Mediazona, working with the BBC’s Russian service and a team of volunteers, has been compiling and maintaining a named list of the Russian military dead. The list is built from publicly available, verifiable sources, such as social media posts by relatives, reports in local media, and statements from regional authorities. Of course, this list is not exhaustive, as not every death is publicly reported.

To build a more complete picture of the war’s true toll, we have developed an estimate based on excess male mortality, using data from the national Probate Registry. This statistical method, created in collaboration with Meduza, helps to account for the limitations of relying solely on publicly reported deaths.

EN ESPAÑOLПО-РУССКИ

AUF DEUTSCH EN FRANÇAIS

About our reports

This publication is divided into two parts:

Bi-weekly Summary. A text summary, updated every two weeks, in which we report on what we have learned about recent losses and the frontline events that led to the deaths of Russian soldiers.

Interactive Infographics. The second part provides visualisations of the losses since the start of the war, showing, for example, where the dead served or which regions they came from. We update the data for these graphics, while the accompanying text is refreshed but remains largely the same.

A detailed description of our method for estimating total deaths using Probate Registry data can be found at this link.

Last update to the named list: September 26, 2025.

Last update to the Probate Registry estimate: August 29, 2025; estimate as of August 2025

Full named list of verified losses is available here: 200.zona.media.

This week marks the third anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s “partial mobilisation,” announced on September 21, 2022, and still not formally ended. Over these three years, we have confirmed at least 15,100 deaths among mobilised soldiers. For most of those killed, we also know their ages: the largest group are men between 33 and 35.

To learn more about the first months of mobilisation in Russia, read this account from a recruit. For those who flee, the future isn’t that bright either.

Counting Russian losses in the war is gruelling work. We have been maintaining this count for almost three and a half years. If you find this work important, please consider supporting Mediazona: https://donate.zona.media/en

What we know about losses

The map below shows the distribution of casualties across Russia’s regions. These are absolute figures and have not been adjusted for population or number of military units.

You can filter the map to show total losses, losses by branch of service, or the home regions of mobilised soldiers who were killed.

In most cases, official reports or visual cues like uniforms and insignia allow us to determine a soldier’s branch of service, or how he came to be in the army (mobilised, volunteer, prisoner, etc.).

The chart below compares these different groups of servicemen.

From early summer and into the mid-fall season of 2022, volunteers bore the brunt of the losses, which is strikingly different from the situation in the initial stage of the war: in winter and early spring, the Airborne Forces suffered the greatest damage, followed by the Motorised Rifle troops.

By the end of 2022 and the beginning of the next year, losses among prisoners recruited into the Wagner PMC increased markedly. They were formed into “assault groups” to overwhelm Ukrainian positions near Bakhmut.

By March 2023, prisoners became the largest category of war losses. After the capture of Bakhmut, there have been no cases of mass use of prisoners so far.

By September 2024, volunteers once again emerged as the largest category among the KIA. This shift reflects a cumulative effect: prison recruitment had significantly waned, no new mobilisation had been announced, yet the stream of volunteers continued unabated.

By September 26, the death of 5,740 officers of the Russian army and other security agencies had been confirmed.

The proportion of officer deaths among overall casualties has steadily declined since the conflict began. In the early stages, when professional contract soldiers formed the main invasion force, officers accounted for up to 10% of fatalities. By November 2024, this figure had dropped to between 2–3%—a shift that reflects both evolving combat tactics and the intensive recruitment of volunteer infantry, who suffer casualty rates many times higher than their commanding officers.

Officers killed in Ukraine

To date, the deaths of 12 Russian generals have been officially confirmed: three Lieutenant Generals, seven Major Generals, and two who had retired from active service.

Lieutenant General Oleg Tsokov, deputy commander of the Southern Military District, was killed in July 2023. In December 2024, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, head of the Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical (NBC) Protection Troops, was killed by a bomb in Moscow. Lieutenant General Yaroslav Moskalik, a senior officer in the General Staff’s Main Operational Directorate, was killed by a car bomb in a Moscow suburb in April 2025.

Two deputy army commanders, Major General Andrei Sukhovetsky (41st Army) and Major General Vladimir Frolov (8th Army), were killed in the first weeks of the war. In June 2022, Major General Roman Kutuzov was killed in an attack on a troop formation.

Major General Sergei Goryachev, chief of staff of the 35th Combined Arms Army, was killed in June 2023 while commanding forces against the Ukrainian counter-offensive in the Zaporizhzhia region. In November 2023, Major General Vladimir Zavadsky, deputy commander of the 14th Army Corps, was killed near the village of Krynky.

In November 2024, Major General Pavel Klimenko, commander of the 5th Separate Motorised Rifle Brigade (formerly the “Oplot” Brigade of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic), was fatally wounded by an FPV drone.

In July 2025, a strike on the headquarters of the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade killed at least six officers, including the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy, Mikhail Gudkov.

The two retired generals on the list are Kanamat Botashev, a pilot who had been dismissed for crashing a fighter jet and was fighting for Wagner PMC when his Su-25 was shot down in May 2022, and Andrei Golovatsky, a former Interior Ministry general serving an 8.5-year prison sentence who was killed in June 2024.

The date of death is known in over 103,500 cases. While this data does not capture the full daily reality of the war, it does suggest which periods saw the most intense fighting.

Please note that the data of the last few weeks is the most incomplete and may change significantly in the future.

The age of the deceased is mentioned in 113,750 reports. For the first six months of the war, when the fighting was done by the regular army, the 21-23 age group accounted for the most deaths.

Volunteers and mobilised men are significantly older: people voluntarily go to war over 30, and the mobilised are generally over 25.

Help save Mediazona. We need you

Mediazona is in a tough spot—we still haven’t recovered our pre-war level of donations. If we don’t reach at least 5,000 monthly subscribers soon, we’ll be forced to make drastic cuts, limiting our ability to report.

Only you, our readers, can keep Mediazona alive.

Save Mediazona
Save Mediazona
Load more