The BBC Russian service and the Russian site Mediazona indicated on Wednesday that they had identified more than 50,000 Russian soldiers killed since the start of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Their count, published in a joint investigation and stopped on April 7 2024, comes from the exploitation of certain information, such as official press releases, information published in the media and social networks, or collected by going to observe the graves in cemeteries.
Neither Ukraine nor Russia has published a tally of their losses since the start of the war, and both media outlets warn that their count does not claim to be exhaustive. At the end of February, kyiv estimated the number of soldiers killed at 31,000, while the Russian army has only communicated its military losses on very rare occasions and these figures are considered to be largely minimized. Last August, the New York Times, citing American officials, estimated Russian military losses at 120,000 dead. On January 29, in a written response to a parliamentarian, British Defense Minister James Heappey estimated Russian losses at more than 350,000 dead and wounded.
Territorial gains at enormous human cost
In their investigation, BBC Russian and Mediazona focused in particular on the fate of prisoners recruited to fight on the front, a contribution “crucial for the success of (the strategy of) cannon fodder” of the Russian army, note -they. Tens of thousands of inmates were recruited in Russian prisons, in exchange for a promise of release, notably by the Wagner paramilitary group, but also by the regular army.
According to their examination of a sample of more than 1,000 prisoners, half of those conscripted directly by the Russian army had died within two months of being sent to the front. Those recruited by Wagner (until February 2023) died within three months of their enlistment. The two media also point out that more than 27,300 Russian soldiers died in the second year of the conflict “illustrating the enormous human cost of the territorial gains” obtained by Russia, in particular in the Donetsk region from January 2023, during the battle of Bakhmout in the spring of 2023, or even during the large-scale offensive launched last fall and which lasted four months to seize the town of Avdiïvka.