Nearly 50,000 Russian men have died in the war in Ukraine, according to the first independent statistical analysis of Russia's war dead.
Despite such challenges, Mediazona and the BBC's Russian Service, working with a network of volunteers, have used social media postings and photographs of cemeteries across Russia to build a database of confirmed war deaths. As of July 7, they had identified 27,423 dead Russian soldiers. According to their analysis, 25,000 more inheritance cases were opened in 2022 for males aged 15 to 49 than expected. By May 27, 2023, the number of excess cases had shot up to 47,000.
"Their figures might be accurate, or they might not be," Treshchanin, the Mediazona editor, said in an email. "Even if they have sources in the Russian Ministry of Defense, its own data could be incomplete. It's extremely difficult to pull together all of the casualties from the army, Rosgvardia, Akhmat battalion, various private military companies, of which Wagner is the largest, but not the only one.
He found that 24,000 more men under age 50 died in 2022 than expected, a figure that aligns with the analysis of inheritance data. "I am not saying that there couldn't be an excess number of male deaths, but rather that statistically speaking, this difference in deaths could be a mere outcome of chance," he said.