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

Defence Minister Andrei Belousov and Vladimir Putin have presented their summary of the situation on the frontline in 2025—Belousov at a ministry board meeting, and Putin during his annual Q&A session featuring pre-scripted questions.

The key takeaways from both appearances are clear: Putin has no plans for peace, and the Russian army is being prepared for a prolonged war. While both Belousov and Putin cited numerous statistics, neither said a word about Russian army casualties.

Before assessing the year in terms of the human cost, it is necessary to clarify certain aspects of our work as we approach the end of the war’s fourth year. We cannot simply count “fresh” obituaries; consequently, the volunteers’ task becomes increasingly difficult the longer the war continues. By way of example, here is how the workload of processing obituaries was distributed over the past fortnight:

• Deaths in 2025 increased by 1,202; total counted for the year is 19,590;
• Deaths in 2024 increased by 899; total counted for the year is 55,354;
• Deaths in 2023 increased by 149; total counted for the year is 39,184;
• Deaths in 2022 increased by 33; total counted for the year is 18,862;

Furthermore, the year of death remains unknown for another 22,552 soldiers—data that is also regularly updated and supplemented in our records.

We recognise that our work for 2024, for instance, is not even half complete (according to our joint estimate with Meduza, at least 100,000 Russian servicemen died in 2024), and given new data on those missing in action, the proportion counted is even smaller.

Every year, when summarising the figures, we repeat the same conclusion: this year was even bloodier than the last. This has always been an estimate, yet one that has consistently proved accurate, as is now clearly evident from the figures above. Given that counting the casualties for 2025 will clearly drag on for many years, we once again have grounds to say that this year has been the bloodiest yet for the Russian army.

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 December 19, 2025, the death of 6,168 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 128,300 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 138,400 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.