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

In this update, we want to look in a little more detail at the situation around Mala Tokmachka, a small Ukrainian village that has become something of an internet meme.

Mala Tokmachka owes its notoriety to the dispatches of the Russian pro-war blogger Boris Rozhin. More precisely, it became famous after a reel of his comments to Russian television was published, making clear that Russia’s armed forces have spent more than 1,500 days “advancing”, “fighting” and “liberating” Mala Tokmachka.

Russia suffered its first deaths in the fighting for Mala Tokmachka on February 8, 2023. We know that at least three Russian servicemen were killed that day, two of whom served in the reconnaissance platoon of the 1430th Motorised Rifle regiment.

When we compile obituaries, we record not only where the person lived and their dates of birth and death, but also where they were killed. Unfortunately, the vast majority of obituaries do not say where the person died; the only exceptions so far have been Bakhmut and the Kursk region.

For this reason, it is impossible to say from our data alone how many people have died in the fighting for Mala Tokmachka. At present, 31 people on our lists have the village recorded as their place of death. We know the names of a further seven thanks to a leak from the records of ZAGS, Russia’s civil registry office, in which the entries had been filtered to those that included information about where the person died.

So, in total, fewer than 40 people have died fighting for Mala Tokmachka?

Not quite. First, our data is plainly incomplete. If you look in the ZAGS leak at those who died in the Pokrovske and Orikhiv districts of Zaporizhzhia region (the Russian authorities assign Mala Tokmachka to both), the figure rises to more than 5,300 people. These data are incomplete too, since by no means every death certificate records the place of death.

Second, obituaries are being published with ever greater delays, and we have no recent data on casualties. The ZAGS leak offers none either: it runs only to the first half of 2025.

Most of the losses we know of in Mala Tokmachka date to 2023, when Ukrainian forces counterattacked from Orikhiv towards the village of Robotyne but failed to break through the Russian army’s defensive lines. On the whole this has been a relatively “quiet” stretch of the front; throughout 2024, for instance, the Russian army was fighting for control of Robotyne. The sector has now flared up again, and the fighting for Mala Tokmachka is taking place not only in the imagination of Russian propagandists such as Boris Rozhin.

According to the map maintained by the Ukrainian DeepState project, an open-source group that tracks the front line, only the south-eastern part of the village lies in the “grey zone”, the contested strip held by neither side. The pro-Russian channel “Slivochny Kapriz” places a slightly larger area of Mala Tokmachka within Russia’s “zone of unstable control”. The Russian general staff says Mala Tokmachka was “liberated” on November 16, 2025, and on April 21 its chief, Valery Gerasimov, announced that the Russian army was fighting in the town of Orikhiv, that is, “beyond” Mala Tokmachka.

But the story of Mala Tokmachka is far bigger than the fate of one village with a pre-war population of three thousand. There are a great many cases like it: sieges that drag on for years, false reports of “liberation”, and obscure settlements in the fighting for which hundreds, even thousands, of soldiers lose their lives.

When the Russian general staff and the pro-war bloggers announce that some place has been “taken”, they rarely say what kind of place it is: a town, a village or a few houses in the middle of nowhere. In their dispatches it all becomes a bureaucratic naselyonny punkt, or “populated locality”. What matters to the Russian army, from battalion commanders all the way up to the head of the general staff, is the paperwork, and for many months now that paperwork has been counted in captured settlements and captured ground, in what soldiers call zakrasy, the “colouring in” of newly taken territory on the map.

Another term is babkoselo, literally “hag-village”: a settlement where almost no one is left, often no one at all, or at most a handful of elderly residents, usually pensioner women. Much of the Donbas hinterland has been emptying out on both sides of the line since 2014; the young left for the cities long ago, and once the full-scale war began only those with nowhere to go, or too old to leave, stayed behind, the older ones in particular reasoning that there was little point in moving now. There are well over a thousand such settlements in Donetsk region alone, which is why Russia can report the “liberation” of two or three villages a week even at its current sluggish pace.

Then there is the flagovtyk, or “flag-planting”. A single soldier is given one task: to reach a designated point, pushing as far forward as he can, and to unfurl a flag there while a Russian drone films him. The footage is later presented as proof that the territory is under control. A lone man with a flag is not control in any meaningful sense, and the fate of these soldiers is very often grim.

Mala Tokmachka does not really fit the “hag village” image. It is a comparatively large settlement, and it matters because of what lies behind it, the town of Orikhiv, the crucial part of Ukraine’s defences on the Zaporizhzhia front, and beyond Orikhiv, across open fields, the city of Zaporizhzhia itself, one of Ukraine’s largest, which Russia wrote into its constitution as Russian territory in 2022 despite its troops never having got near it.

The result is lying upon lying. Local commanders send men to their deaths to plant flags for the sake of another report; their reports feed the mid-ranking officers above them; and at the top sits Gerasimov, who counts Mala Tokmachka as taken while claiming the army is fighting in the streets of Orikhiv, and who tells Putin that Kupiansk too is fully under Russian control and that the front has moved well beyond it. There is no video evidence that Mala Tokmachka came under Russian control in November, or at any point since.

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 May 22, 2026, the death of 7,147 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 202,000 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 206,000 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.