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

At the end of the summer, Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian general staff, reported on the army’s “spring-summer” offensive campaign, exaggerating its successes. The map he presented showed the area of Russian-controlled territory as being significantly larger than it is in reality. Even Gerasimov’s own report was couched in cautious phrasing, with claims that Ukrainian forces were “almost completely blockaded”, or that their “defeat” or “destruction was being finalised”. The only relatively large settlement captured by Russia during this period was the town of Chasiv Yar, which fell after many months of fighting.

Military analysts, including Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, who visited the Donbas front during the summer, have noted a change in the Russian army’s tactics. Faced with devastating losses from Ukrainian drones, the Russian command has almost completely abandoned attacks with large armoured columns; assaults with motorbikes and buggies have also become less frequent. Instead, troops are far more frequently sent to attack on foot in small groups of two or three. Their objective is to move at night or twilight, often wearing thermal-concealing ponchos, to bypass fortifications and penetrate the first line of Ukrainian fortifications without engaging in a direct fight.

This shift in battlefield tactics reflects a deeper transformation within the Russian military itself: the regular army has increasingly adopted the methods of the Wagner mercenary group. The imitation is sometimes literal; the army is reportedly creating special units for soldiers with incurable diseases such as HIV and Hepatitis C, mirroring Wagner’s own “Umbrella” squad, which was named after a corporation from the Resident Evil video game series.

The Ukrainian frontline, suffering from a severe infantry shortage, is often held by similarly small and well-camouflaged groups. According to Kofman, these defenders are frequently under orders not to open fire on infiltrating Russian teams to avoid revealing their own positions to Russia’s swarms of FPV drones and guided aerial bombs. According to Kofman’s analysis, these defenders are frequently under orders not to open fire on infiltrating Russian teams to avoid revealing their own positions to Russia’s swarms of FPV, or first-person view, drones and guided aerial bombs. 

While the vast majority of these infiltration missions fail, some units get through. They gather at designated points and are resupplied by drone before attempting to storm a position from within. This approach has allowed the Russian army to advance and resulted in a deep breakthrough of more than 10 kilometres on the Dobropillia front, near the city of Pokrovsk. According to various estimates, Russian troops managed to push 12–14 kilometres forward from their previous positions.

However, this has not led to a reduction in casualties; crossing several kilometres of open terrain on foot remains a near-impossible task, and most of the small units are eliminated by drone strikes.

The effectiveness of these advances is being questioned, even by pro-war Russian commentators. Blogger Anatoly Radov recently described how these territorial gains often exist only on paper. “A pair of soldiers went forward, the Ukrainians [the original uses an ethnic slur] hit them with fire, and based on a video of this, OSINT analysts coloured the territory in as ours—and everyone’s happy. And no one gives a damn that those two soldiers were just killed by drone drops, and that in reality, there is no advance. Instead, you have huge grey kill-zones where they keep throwing soldiers, because it’s ‘ours’, it’s ‘already been coloured in by the cartographers’,” he wrote in a post on Telegram. The pressure to show progress by colouring in maps for senior command, such as the one presented to General Gerasimov, comes at the cost of immense casualties for gains that may be entirely illusory.

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 12, the death of nearly 5,700 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 nearly 102,000 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 111,700 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.