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

Note on the February 13 update. We have added more than 9,000 people to our list of names in two weeks, a record high. This does not reflect current frontline losses; rather, our team has begun a systematic review of backlogs accumulated from various sources throughout the war. 

These include leaked personnel lists of various military units (for example, the 15th Motorised Rifle Brigade, reported on by Verstka) and files from the Wagner PMC’s “Project K” prisoner recruitment drive. In addition, we collect social media and group chats posts searching for missing soldiers and cross-reference them to see if any information about their deaths has emerged. We’re also taking into account personnel lists published by the Ukrainian project “I Want to Live.”

Important: none of these sources is sufficient on its own to confirm a death. We take the names of servicemen from all these sources (personnel lists, posts about missing persons, etc.) and verify each one against government databases (such as the Probate Registry). Each entry is added to our list only after confirmation by Russian sources: either officially via government databases or through obituaries from relatives.

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When sending people to the front, Russian authorities prioritise remote, impoverished eastern regions, trying to avoid fuelling social unrest in areas where political trouble may arise. This is true of Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as the republics of the North Caucasus. This is the conclusion of an analysis by The Bell, an independent Russian outlet, which studied data on Russian military losses collected by Mediazona, BBC News Russian, and a team of volunteers.

For the vast majority of regions, a clear rule applies: the rate of losses correlates directly with the percentage of the population living below the poverty line. The poorer the region, the higher the losses.

In Russia, the poor are defined as those earning less than the official subsistence minimum, currently standing at 18,939 rubles ($248) a month.

At the same time, the study revealed anomalies alongside these patterns. Residents of Tyva and Chukotka are 25 times more likely to be killed at the front than Moscow residents, despite official statistics showing significantly fewer poor people in Chukotka than in Tyva. This is most likely due to the more successful Ministry of Defense recruitment campaigns in the Russian Far North, especially among indigenous peoples.

But there is also a “reverse” anomaly in the regions of the North Caucasus. For example, while the poverty rate in Karachay-Cherkessia and Ingushetia is significantly higher than the national average, the level of losses remains very low, roughly on par with the richest cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Most likely, the Kremlin avoids setting strict recruitment targets for the heads of these republics to prevent social tension in an already volatile region.

You can read the complete study on The Bell’s website.

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 February 13, 2026, the death of 6,414 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 157,850 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 159,200 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.