Four years of “partial” mobilisation. New data reveals the fates of Russia‘s mobilised men

In our count of Russian army’s losses, we attempt to establish exactly how a person ended up in the war: whether they signed a contract before February 2022, enlisted as a volunteer after the invasion began, were recruited as an inmate from a penal colony, or were mobilised. Over time, information regarding mobilised soldiers has grown increasingly scarce: obituaries from the past two years most often omit any mention of how the deceased ended up at the front. Therefore, we consider our figure of 20,500 mobilised personnel killed to be our most conservative estimate and a significant undercount.

Assigning the “mobilised” status is further complicated by the fact that other types of recruitment can be identified through indirect signs. For example, a “volunteer” can be identified by their age, by social media profiles pointing to a civilian life prior to 2022, or by holding the rank of private at the time of death (if someone served in the army before the war, it is highly unlikely they would remain a private by 2026). The “inmate” status can be assigned if we locate an active prison sentence matching the deceased’s full name. For the “mobilised” status, however, there are no indirect indicators—only explicit mentions of mobilisation in an obituary.

Because of this lack of data, we cannot provide a full assessment of what has happened to mobilised men over these years. However, we have gained access to two major data leaks, which we have used to track developments over the past two years.

Mediazona and other media outlets obtained the first leak from a Russian military medic, Alexey Zhilyaev: the bulk of the dataset concerns patients in Defence Ministry hospitals, but it also includes the rosters of several military units and formations. These lists contain the names of around 40,000 mobilised men, predominantly covering the period of 2023–2024.

The second leak consists of the staffing rosters of several hundred military units, with records current as of July 2025. This leak contains data on more than 200,000 Russian servicemen, 16,000 of whom are designated as “mobilised”.

As usual, before working with the leaks, we verified their data against state registries and other open sources, and concluded that they are reliable.

From the first leak, we selected 2,515 mobilised soldiers—focusing exclusively on those who served in units mentioned in the second leak—and examined how their status had changed over the course of a year.

The discrepancy amounted to 1,152 men. The fate of 912 of them remains unknown: they could have been transferred to other military units for which we lack data, or discharged on medical grounds. The latter is more likely, as the core of our first list is based on records of the wounded.

Of the 1,152 men missing from the later rosters, 240 were killed.

In the July 2025 leak, 1,363 men remained. Of these, 972 entries on the staffing roster retained the “mobilised” designation. However, 355 men had changed their status, becoming contract soldiers (marked “fixed term”), with contract signing dates in 2024 and 2025.

Another 36 men were in the process of being discharged on medical grounds.

Out of the 1,363 men, only 21 became officers—specifically, junior lieutenants.

At the time of this summary’s publication, we have managed to confirm the deaths of 187 soldiers from the second list via state registries.

In total, out of the initial 2,515 mobilised men, we have confirmed the deaths of 427. Meanwhile, only 173 of these have been recorded via obituaries and added to our RUSSIA 200 database.

Based on these figures, we can assume that our data on killed mobilised soldiers underestimates the true losses in this category by at least half (and likely even more, given our classification errors). We are unable to estimate the number of wounded. Furthermore, even among those who remain on military unit rosters, at least a quarter have signed a contract and lost their “mobilised” status.