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

At the end of March, “Somebody Else’s War,” a public page on the Russian social network VK that tracked soldiers from Bashkortostan killed in the war in Ukraine, announced it was shutting down.

“All this time, the page’s administrators were based outside Russia, which allowed us to speak openly. However, the Russian security services have long been hunting us, and the pressure on our relatives and loved ones still living in the republic has now crossed all acceptable boundaries. We have no moral right to continue our work while putting the safety and lives of those dear to us at risk,” the page’s creators explained.

By the time it closed, “Somebody Else’s War” had identified 9,056 people from Bashkortostan killed in the war. Our own lists currently contain 9,039 dead from the republic, though our data do not fully overlap: some names appear in our records but not theirs, and vice versa. Bashkortostan has led the country in absolute numbers of deaths since summer 2024, which may explain why pressure was brought to bear on the administrators of this page in particular.

Dozens of regional media outlets and public pages across Russia keep their own independent tallies of the dead. Their data are often considerably more complete than ours: when collection is limited to a single region, volunteers are less likely to face the problem of too many obituaries to track.

We very rarely mention these pages for security reasons. As a rule, they are well known enough within their own region, and unwanted attention from outside would only do them harm. But without their work, our data would be far less complete.

One example of such work ending in forced emigration is the filming of Wagner Group cemeteries. Vitaly Votanovsky, an activist from Krasnodar krai in southern Russia, used his VK page to post photographs and videos of hundreds of graves belonging to convicts and mercenaries killed in the war. After receiving death threats, he was forced to leave the country.

The authorities also try to suppress information about losses through court-ordered blocks. In published court records, Mediazona found more than 1,500 rulings employing the phrase “information disclosing personnel losses.”

The censorship reaches even into the pro-war camp. Recently, one of those channels cited Mediazona’s casualty figures for the first time. Within three to four hours, the post was deleted. Posts about individual losses are often tolerated; it is the overall numbers the authorities cannot abide.

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.

Note on the Feb 24, 2026 update: We enriched thousands of older records after obtaining confirmation that the servicemen had signed contracts after the start of the war. As a result, the number of volunteers increased significantly between the Feb 13 and Feb 24 reports. Additionally, we removed the “inmate” designation from several hundred records that had previously been classified as such based on indirect evidence (prior criminal convictions, service in the Storm unit). We are continuously working to refine our database.

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 April 10, 2026, the death of 7,003 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 15 Russian generals have been officially confirmed: five Lieutenant Generals, seven Major Generals, two who had retired from active service, and one Ukrainian SBU general who had fled to Russia.

Lieutenant General Oleg Tsokov, deputy commander of the Southern Military District, was killed in July 2023—the first officer of that rank to die in the war. 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. In December 2025, Lieutenant General Fanil Sarvarov, head of the Operational Training Directorate of the Russian General Staff, was killed in Moscow by a car bomb. On March 31, 2026, Lieutenant General Alexander Otroschenko, commander of the mixed aviation corps of the Northern Fleet, was killed in the crash of an An-26 transport aircraft in Crimea.

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 189,670 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 192,200 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.