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

In 2026, Russian courts continued to remove records of claims to declare people missing or dead.

This process began in the last days of 2025. At that time, all cases in this category disappeared from the websites of courts in 50 regions: not only lawsuits filed by military units, but also “civil” cases.

A source told Mediazona at the time that the “technical assignment” came in a letter from the judicial department on December 26. Mediazona was unable to confirm the existence of such a letter, but in 2026, regions that had not managed to remove records before the New Year began to carry out the “assignment.”

By the end of January, another 10,000 records had disappeared from Russian court websites.

Mediazona has been monitoring lawsuits in this category since the beginning of the full-scale war: in any armed conflict, there should be missing persons. However, until the first half of 2024, representatives of military units or the Ministry of Defence only appealed to the courts in exceptional cases—for example, 17 sailors from the cruiser Moskva were recognised as dead. The relatives of the missing persons also had no motivation to go to court, partly because without a certificate from the military unit, their lawsuit would have been dismissed anyway.

The situation changed dramatically with Andrei Belousov becoming the new Minister of Defence. Sergei Shoigu’s successor ordered a “search” for the missing, and military units went to court: this is much easier than actually finding, identifying, and delivering the body of the deceased to their relatives.

In December 2025, the military filed 2,500 lawsuits per week in Russian courts, or 500 per working day, and the number of appeals only grew. As of early December 2025, Mediazona was aware of 88,000 claims filed to have soldiers declared dead or missing.

At the final meeting of the Ministry of Defense, Andrei Belousov emphasized that by the end of the year, “the number of military personnel found had tripled; 48% of the total number of missing persons, every second person had been found.”

These words could only mean one thing: what we see in the courts is only half of the actual number of MIA soldiers. If there are 90,000 lawsuits, then at least 180,000 bodies were not recovered from the battlefield.

On December 17, Belousov said that “every second person had been found,” and by the 26th, the courts had begun to remove all traces of this work.

Unfortunately, these records provide very little information for our names list: the vast majority of them are anonymised.

The information still published in a few courts does not allow us to extrapolate, that is, to “calculate” the dynamics in the courts that have deleted all the data. Military units file lawsuits unevenly, and some courts were literally flooded with such cases.

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.

30 January 2026 update note. We have rechecked all entries in the list in state registers and clarified the mechanism for determining the region for the KIA soldiers. The numbers in certain regions on the map has changed. If a number has decreased, this does not mean that we have deleted any records—we have simply moved them to another region, as we considered it to be more accurate. 

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 January 30, 2026, the death of 6,353 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 137,950 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 149,750 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.