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

For this summary, we, in collaboration with Meduza, have updated our estimate of the actual number of deaths based on the Probate Registry (for more on the method, see our first publication).

Our analysis shows that by August 2025, around 220,000 Russian men between 18 and 55 had been killed in the war.

In our work with the Probate Registry, we found that male mortality reached a new peak in November 2024, at approximately 3,000 deaths per week.

We cannot yet say with absolute certainty that losses were this high at the end of 2024. The data from the very end of the year sits on the edge of where our model’s accuracy begins to decrease.

However, this surge is clear to see in a reliable indicator: the ratio of probate cases opened for men compared to those for women, as female mortality has not been affected by the war.

While the named list compiled by Mediazona and the BBC shows a corresponding local peak, it is far smaller. This could be due to a significant lag between a soldier’s death, the publication of an obituary, and our analysis. It is also possible that many of these losses were simply invisible to our open-source counting methods.

One likely explanation is the huge number of lawsuits that began flooding Russian courts in the second half of 2024, seeking to have soldiers officially declared missing in action or deceased.

Mediazona has reported on this process in detail. In most cases, the claims are filed by the Ministry of Defence itself, which needs to remove a soldier who disappeared on a combat mission (and is, for all intents and purposes, dead) from its official personnel lists.

Before mid-2024, such lawsuits were almost unheard of. This means that a large number of missing soldiers, aside from those whose bodies were later exchanged, were not being counted at all. They appeared neither in obituaries nor in the probate registry. On paper, these men were not considered dead.

The mass filing of these cases has changed the situation. Once a court declares a man deceased, his family receives a death certificate and can file for inheritance just as they would after a funeral. A small number of these men subsequently appear in our named list, as we cross-reference old social media posts about missing soldiers with the Probate Registry.

However, the majority of those declared dead by a court will remain invisible to the named count, because families do not typically post obituaries after a court ruling. They are, however, visible in the mortality estimate.

By the start of August, Russian courts had received around 50,000 such military-related claims. The courts are now declaring more than 250 men missing or dead every day, a figure comparable to the daily casualty rate on the front line.

This process of legally recognising long-missing soldiers as dead is also apparent in the Probate Registry. As with the courts, the missing only began to appear in this data during 2024, not at the start of the war.

The graph below shows the rise in probate cases where a significant amount of time passed between the official date of death and its registration (i.e., the issuance of a death certificate—this is not directly related to inheritance).

By the end of 2024, for instance, the number of male probate cases with a delay of 100 days to a year had soared to 50 times the peacetime level of 2021.

According to Article 45 of Russia’s Civil Code, the legal date of death for a person declared deceased by a court is either the date the ruling takes effect or, for a soldier, the date he disappeared “in life-threatening circumstances.” This date is usually based on a report from the soldier’s commanding officer.

Because the Ministry of Defence files most of these lawsuits, the dates of death used in court are generally accurate, or close to it, although court decisions also become dates of death occasionally.

The graph below shows the same probate cases as the previous one but distributes them by their legal date of death. It is clear that the courts are assigning these deaths to dates in the past, which likely correspond to when the men were actually killed.

The full impact of these court rulings will become clearer in our future estimates, as the data for 2025 solidifies. In our next analysis, we will also be able to investigate the mortality peak of late 2024 in greater depth.

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 August 29, the death of over 5,500 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 98,340 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 107,600 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.