Putin’s inglorious dead: how many Russians have been killed in Ukraine?
The obituaries tell only half the story. Nikolai Serdyukov, the best district policing officer in Ulyanovsk, for example, may have felt ideologically compelled to join President Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine and may have fought bravely to the end, but he still died a miserable death far from home.
It was a fate shared by Alexander Volkov, a bespectacled and apparently erudite archaeologist from Chuvashia, last seen clutching a bunch of daisies and laughing before going to war, now just another of Putin’s inglorious dead.
“My dear, Beloved, the most reliable man in my life. I am writing you a letter to eternity,” wrote another Russian, Olesya Smorodinova, in a letter her husband Ivan will never read. After his death, she said: “Your path was so short that I didn’t have time to enjoy you. Now you will for ever be 28 years old.”
With each passing day, the numbers killed rises. Some as young as 20, others are simply missing, vanishing on a front line that shifts only glacially. Back home in Russia, women such as Irina Chistyakova, have been searching for loved ones since the war’s start. Her conscript son, Kirill, vanished just a month after Putin’s invasion. She has travelled from Petrozavodsk, more than 2,000km south to look for his body in Rostov morgues.
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She now runs an online group, “Sun of Life”, where other Russians seek their lost brothers, sons and fathers. “On the left side of the chest he has a tattoo of a tired angel,” a woman named Elena writes in the hopes of finding her brother. “[His] uniform has red embroidery. Scar on the right side in the groin area.”
Not all those killed, of course, are innocents. Dmitry Postnikov and Oleg Sizov, incarcerated after murdering two businessmen in 2016, joined Wagner after landing 18-year prison sentences for their crimes. They were both killed in action a year ago, much like 19,000 other prisoners, who comprise a high proportion of Russia’s dead in Ukraine.
A recent joint investigation between independent Russian outlets Mediazona and Meduza revealed that at least 75,000 Russians under the age of 50 have died. This, though, is still likely to be a vast underestimate.
Breaking down the figures, they identified 21,000 contract soldiers, 19,000 prisoners, and 16,000 mobilised soldiers, saying actual losses likely ranged between 66,000 (in line with Pentagon estimates) and 88,000 men. The current rate of losses suggests that since the close of the period covered by their analysis, a further 8,000 are likely to have died, bringing the total to roughly 83,000. The number does not account for Russian military personnel from Ukraine’s occupied Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
The increase in deaths is most notable among those aged between 20 to 24, according to Dmitriy Kobak, the co-author of a draft paper examining Russian deaths. “These age groups have fewer deaths without the war so any increase due to war becomes very noticeable.”
By region, Krasnodar Krai, in the North Caucasus region, appears to have lost the most people — 1,715, according to data provided to The Times by Maria Vyushkova from the Free Buryatia Foundation. The mineral-rich region of Bahkortostan has suffered some of the biggest losses to date. The site of rare protests against the war this year, Mediazona estimates some 1,438 deaths from this region alone.
However, Russia remains “completely indifferent to the scale of the slaughter and how many of its men it’s losing on top of an already acute demographic crisis”, Chatham House’s Keir Giles said. To this end, Russia is making efforts to keep official figures from leaking. “Russia seems to be taking no chances in concealing the numbers,” he added.
US officials have previously stated that Russia’s military casualties could be as high as 120,000 deaths, with 170,000-180,000 injured. Those numbers were provided in August last year, months before Russia’s long struggle to seize control of Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine. Britain’s Ministry of Defence, meanwhile, estimated in December that Russia has sustained more than 350,000 casualties — killed and wounded — as well as military equipment losses, among them 2,600 tanks and 4,900 armoured vehicles. Some 70,000 of those losses were fatalities, the MoD said.
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Despite Putin’s control of state media and savage stamping out of protest, there are occasional voices of dissent. For example, Andriy Morozov, a Russian military blogger, caused a stir shortly before his apparent suicide this month when he wrote that Russia had lost some 16,000 men in the siege of Avdiivka. Ukraine’s own most recent figures suggest that, to date, some 412,000 Russian combatants have been killed or wounded. Meanwhile, Idel.realli, a US-backed website, has traced 11,107 deaths from the Volga region alone, with the regional figures slightly higher than those provided by Mediazona’s tally.
There is a wide regional disparity in terms of Russia’s losses. While ethnic Russians comprise the overall majority of those killed, with about 1,170 confirmed from the Moscow region, Russia’s ethnic minorities and “small nations” are vastly over-represented in death figures, according to Vyushkova. “We have found 37 confirmed Chukchi casualties. The real number may be much greater,” Vyushkova said. “That’s a lot, because there are only 16,000 Chukchi in Russia. And they are exempt from mandatory military service.”
Some ethnic groups fear they may die out completely. There are only 2,730 Telengits in Russia, and ten of them are among Russia’s confirmed casualties. In one case authorities attempted to draft 100 per cent of the adult male population of a Nanai village, according to Vyushkova. “It is politically safer to put the burden of mobilisation on those groups no one cares about,” she added.
Those who have lost relatives are afraid to speak out for fear of losing death compensation of up to 5 million rubles (£43,000). Furthermore, the statistics do not account for those who are simply missing — and there are few incentives to retrieve any stray bodies.
The body of one 47-year-old man from Buryatia, for example, has been lying in a tank on the front lines for “about a year”. “Today is exactly one year since our friend, colleague, comrade, brother Ikhineev Dmitry Melsovich has not been with us,” stated a post paying tribute to him on VK, Russia’s Facebook, on February 7. The likelihood of death is higher for some groups, such as Buryats, than others, as Russia sends its “meat waves” to the front.
It’s possible that some deaths are registered in parts of Ukraine that Russia claims to have annexed the temporarily occupied Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, too. “Rosstat doesn’t provide any data on these regions,” said Kobak.
Several men from Tatarstan’s Alga battalion do not fall under the numbers of Russian dead — even though several dozen were believed to be have been killed. “A f***ing tonne of people have been killed here,” a commander reportedly stated after being captured near Bakhmut. The bodies were simply left on the battlefield last February.
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In spring last year the Russian state made the process somewhat easier for those with missing relatives in order “to simplify the procedures for recognising a citizen as missing, declaring him dead, and establishing the fact of death of a serviceman during a special military operation”.
In some cases, women have been offered money to recognise their missing relatives as dead. However, the numbers of people pursuing this course of action seem low — and no confirmation of death means no compensation payments. “If the soldier is MIA they get nothing,” said Vyushkova.
The prospect of comparatively good compensation enticed many men from deprived regions to head to Ukraine. “The lives and the standard of living in the rural areas are so miserable, and can be transformed by the kinds of salaries that are promised (even if not actually paid) for signing up for a fixed period on the front line,” said Giles.
Despite these losses, support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine remains high. “Various kinds of polls conducted by different pollsters, using different methodologies, consistently shows majority support for the war,” said Dr Maria Popova, the co-author of a new book on the conflict.
There is a “loud minority” of people apparently against the war — often for personal reasons as opposed to out of any disgust for the atrocities their government is inflicting on Ukrainians. “The war in Ukraine is a mistake and we will have to pay dearly for the short-sightedness of our government,” Maria Andreeva, a 34-year-old woman who has become the face of anti-war protests in Russia told The Times last month.
Indeed, intercepted phonecalls widely publicised in a new documentary film, Intercepted, suggest some Russians actively relish the opportunity to “beat bandera [Ukrainians] into shashlik”. “Ordinary people kill and brag about atrocities,” noted a recent review in Novaya Gazeta Europe.
Opinion polling can be notoriously unreliable in Russia. There is now, however, a sense among people that nothing can be done to change the status quo. “Part of the population has chosen to become apathetic: their condition can be referred to as ‘learnt indifference’,” noted a recent report from the Carnegie Endowment think tank.
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Beleaguered opposition movements have had a more domestic focus, particularly now with the death of Alexei Navalny. “Disgust at the corruption of the Putin regime is more likely to reach a broader swathe of the population than criticism of the war,” said Popova.
Nonetheless, there have been small waves of individual protest activity — such as arson attacks against military enlistment offices — which Russia attempts to downplay as the result of “foreign interference”. There have been more than 200 across the country since the war began.
The numbers of Russia’s war dead of course pale in comparison with Ukraine’s suffering. Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state has estimated that about 900,000 to 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens (among them 260,000 children), have been detained and forcibly deported to Russia via “filtration” camps.
President Zelensky has said that some 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s civilian death toll also remains unknown — though the UN has verified more than 10,000 civilian deaths. In Russian-occupied Mariupol, for example, where death toll estimates have ranged from about 8,000 to as high as 100,000.
In a rare acknowledgement of the casualties, Putin invited families of his “military heroes” to a gala dinner last year. He promised that the Russian state would always “come to the rescue” of fallen servicemen and women.
“If you’ve got more bodies than the Ukrainians have bullets, then again, you’re left with somebody who can overrun the position,” said Giles. The stakes are high, as Ukrainians are fighting to deter Russia’s same disregard for life displayed at home.
“For Ukrainians there is no other choice,” Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of Ukraine’s Nobel-winning Center for Civil Liberties, told The Times. “When the invaded state lays down weapons it will be occupied. If we, Ukrainians, stop fighting, there will be no freedom, no democracy, no Ukraine.”
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