BBC Russian, independent media group Mediazona and volunteers have been counting deaths since February 2022. New graves in cemeteries helped provide the names of many soldiers.
The overall death toll - of more than 50,000 - is eight times higher than the only official public acknowledgement of fatality numbers ever given by Moscow.
The actual number of Russian deaths is likely to be much higher.
The numbers do not include the deaths of militia in Russian-occupied Donetsk and Luhansk - in eastern Ukraine. If they were added, the death toll on the Russian side would be even higher.
The BBC estimates at least two in five of Russia’s dead fighters are people who had nothing to do with the country’s military before the invasion.
At the start of the 2022 invasion, Russia was able to use its professional troops to conduct complicated military operations - explains Samuel Cranny-Evans of the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi).
But a lot of those experienced soldiers are now likely to be dead or wounded, says the defence analyst, and have been replaced by people with little training or military experience - such as volunteers, civilians and prisoners.
These people can’t do what professional soldiers can do, explains Mr Cranny-Evans. “This means they have to do things that are a lot simpler tactically - which generally seems to be a forward assault onto Ukrainian positions with artillery support.”
The latest analysis focused on the names of 9,000 Russian prison inmates who we know were killed on the front line.
For more than 1,000 of them, we confirmed their military contract start dates and when they were killed.
We found that, under Wagner, those former prisoners had survived for an average of three months.
However, as the graph above suggests, those recruited later by the defence ministry only lived for an average of two months.
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Such a fucking waste.
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Unfortunately, they have way more men to send out and die. Probably only the poor and/or disenfranchised Russians or political rivals are sent into the meatgrinder. I bet metropoles are losing far less men than the countryside.
If you run the numbers of the back of an envelope then Russia has approximately 3,000 men turning 18 every single day. They won’t run out of meat anytime soon.
Russia had 1,479,637 births in 2006 acccording to Rostat. That means about 4000 births per day and about half of them are men. So 2000 or so are turning 18 each day. Also this is the lowest of the low bar for losses. They currently have 50,000 confirmed, with either offical Russian statement or a family member showing proof of death in Ukraine. That also means 85,000 are still on the list of being checked, which is a massive number by itself. Also a lot of soldiers are injured heavily in fighting as to no longer being able to fight. That number is usually twice as high as deaths. They are also added to casulty numbers. If you do that we talk casulties between 150,000 to 405,000. Those numbers start to have an effect on Russias demographics.
Thanks for checking the figures, I think I used CIA factbook when i did it with some assumptions. Usual caveats apply, rich kids won’t get drafted, birth rate has seasonal variations, assume everyone lives to at least 18 etc.
Either way, the supply of meat is more than capable of weathering these losses. Not forever of course, but unless the casualty rate increases sharply and soon, then Russia can maintain this.
