These are not official numbers, but they are the possible numbers of a war that is devastating Russia, but more in some places than others. Few people leave Moscow or Saint Petersburg to go and fight in Ukraine. People living in Bashkortostan or Tatarstan cannot say the same
How many people died no one knows. Neither civilian nor military, especially because Ukraine and Russia have been laconic in disclosing the number of victims caused by a war that this Tuesday turns four years old.
Still, there are those who make a continuous effort to try to tell the whole story. This is the case of Mediazona, the BBC’s Russian service, which continues to publish data relating to the war, particularly from Moscow’s side.
According to the most recent balance, 200,000 soldiers have died since February 24, 2022, with 23,000 names added to the list in the last 10 days.
This does not directly mean that 23 thousand Russian soldiers died in one week. The brutal increase is rather explained by the disclosure of secret data on the Russian side, which allowed us to have a new idea of the size of the war among the people led by Vladimir Putin.
From the Arctic to Dagestan, from Kaliningrad to the Bering Strait, there are 27 thousand cities from which citizens left to die in war.
As Mediazona writes, the Russian state continues in a concerted effort to try to hide as much as possible the true impact of the war. It is not possible to hide the failure of four years in which progress has been meager, but the numbers, these, are being tampered with by the Kremlin as best they can.
And as in any autocratic state, releasing Russian data is especially difficult. Even more difficult when we talk about data linked to the Armed Forces and their operations.
Still, it happens. Whether with the help of defectors, sharing information from Ukraine or even posts on social media by those looking for missing family members, those who search end up finding more and more dead on the Russian side.
Even so, as Mediazona points out, double confirmation is always necessary, which means that thousands of names are in limbo, as there is no complete certainty that they died in the war.
“Tens of thousands of obituaries wait in our list, waiting to be processed and verified,” this publication writes.
It helps, therefore, when things happen like what Manticore did, which released a massive amount of data that it found in Russian civil registries, which contains statistics relating to births, but also marriages and, most importantly, death certificates.
For the calculation, all certificates that clearly list Ukraine, but also the border regions of Kursk, Bryansk or Belgorod as the place of death, were taken into account.
Cross-checking this data with the pending list that Mediazona keeps allowed us to reach the 23,000 deaths in just 10 days, all independently verified.
In any case, the number will be much higher, especially because the data released only contains information until the beginning of 2025, leaving deaths from most of last year to be accounted for.
“Even with this data, our numbers are conservative, not exaggerated, 200 thousand [mortos]”, writes Mediazona, which decided to name many of the dead, also giving faces to those most directly affected by the war that Vladimir Putin launched four years ago.
This is the case of Alexey Zharkov, a 35-year-old sniper who died in Avdiivka, one of the hardest battles of the war. This is also the case with Rustam Rustamov, who was killed at the age of 24 in the Zaporizhzhia region. Younger was Alexander Ninek, who arrived at the war from the Far East, from the city of Uelen, on the Bering Strait, close to the United States, and died at the age of 19.
According to data from Mediazona, the impact is especially visible in urban areas. About 68%, or 122,700 deaths, were from these areas.
Interestingly, this does not cover cities like Moscow or Saint Petersburg. There, in the largest Russian cities, few go to war, so few die in it, which confirms Vladimir Putin’s predilection for sending those who live away from the elites into the field.
Mediazona also writes that the main cities, especially those with more than one million inhabitants, have few registered deaths. On the contrary, when talking about cities with more than 100 thousand inhabitants, the scenario is different, since together they have almost a third of the total number of military deaths. The remaining two-thirds come mostly from small towns and rural areas.
Admitting that the numbers will be much more devastating, this project gives a minimal idea of how the war is impacting Russia, also showing that the damage is more visible the further away the elite are.
This alone explains why the distant regions of Bashkortostan or Tatarstan are at the top of those with the most deaths.
