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

In this update, we want to explain how we process and verify entries in our database, and what kinds of errors can arise in the course of that work. We touched on this this week in the article about algorithmic misfires and attempts to “poison” our data.

Beyond incorrect photographs and fabricated entries (which crop up extremely rarely and which we usually manage to filter out before publication), there are other categories of error. The most difficult to deal with is duplicates.

The database we maintain together with volunteers and the BBC includes several layers of automated checks designed to flag whether a new entry duplicates an existing one. On top of that, similar names are cross-checked by hand.

Errors arise from incomplete data, misspellings in last names or patronymics, or from cases in which different names turn out to belong to the same person. The last of these is extremely rare: it may happen, for example, when someone has Russified their name, and one obituary lists the original while another gives the Russified version.

Incomplete data means that one obituary might give only a last name and first name, while another source, such as a photograph from a cemetery, provides the full three-part name. It can also happen that these entries end up pinned to different locations on the map, because in one case we know only the person's place of residence (or region), and in the other we know the place of burial, and the two do not always match.

A simple overlap between “last name + first name” and “same last name + first name + patronymic” is not in itself grounds for treating an entry as a duplicate: our database contains a good number of full namesakes, and there are even individuals who share the same full name and the same age at death, yet are entirely different people.

From time to time we go back to entries that lack a complete name and try to fill in the gaps, for example by searching for additional news reports, checking whether a photograph of a grave has been sent to us, or attempting to locate the person in a government registry. If it turns out that such an entry duplicates one where the full name was already on file, we remove the duplicate.

Ahead of this update alone, we removed more than ten duplicates found in this way; the process runs continuously in the background.

The most troubling errors, from our point of view, are cases in which we add to the list someone who is in fact alive, or who died in circumstances unrelated to the war.

A living person does not end up on our list by accident. What happens is that we find a report of the death of a real member of the armed forces, but the information proves to be inaccurate, fabricated, or, in the rarest of cases, the person was genuinely believed to have been killed but turns out to be alive.

If such an entry is never corroborated by another source, we remove it. We also remove entries immediately when someone points out the mistake. The source that reported the death of a living person, if it is a social media page, is placed on a blacklist.

A person who did not die in the war can find their way onto our list in several ways. The entry may stem from a photograph of a grave in the military section of a cemetery, where the particular burial does not in fact belong to a service member. A second scenario is an obituary we have misinterpreted: a farewell to a civilian whose photograph, for example, shows them in military uniform.

A third scenario involves a poor-quality source that has wrongly classified someone who did not die in the war as a member of the military.

Such cases are extremely rare. In the year since the list was first published, we received fewer than ten reports of this kind, and took down roughly ten further entries ourselves after re-examining photographs of graves.

We do, however, count as casualties those soldiers who served in the war against Ukraine but died on Russian soil as a result of their wounds, or because of psychological consequences of their service, including suicide. They are assigned a separate category in our database, and in future updates we intend to distinguish them in the published list as well (in practice, their numbers are very small).

There is also a separate class of inaccuracy that is less serious and does not compromise any individual entry as such: difficulties in establishing a person’s category of service (volunteer, prisoner recruited to fight, mobilised conscript, contract soldier) or in pinpointing a precise location.

If you spot an error in our list at 200.zona.media, please let us know through the feedback bot on Telegram, @mediazzzona_bot, or by using the report function on an individual profile page.

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 March 13, 2026, the death of 6,912 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 184,270 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 186,300 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.