Independent Russian media outlet Mediazona, working with the BBC Russian Service and a team of volunteers, has confirmed by name the deaths of 239,350 Russian military personnel in the war in Ukraine.
The latest update, covering the period from the start of the invasion on February 24, 2022, was published on August 14.
Among the identified dead are 87,749 volunteers, 26,416 recruited prisoners and 19,778 mobilised soldiers. The total also includes 7,533 officers, among them 15 generals.
Officers made up as much as 10 per cent of fatalities in the opening phase of the war, a share that had fallen to between 2 and 3 per cent by November 2024, according to Mediazona.
The count is compiled exclusively from publicly available open sources, including obituaries, social media posts by relatives, local media reports, cemetery records and statements by regional authorities. Losses among the forces of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics are excluded.
The date of death is known in 221,500 cases, or about 93 per cent of the confirmed total.
Mediazona and the BBC emphasise that the named list represents only a verified minimum, meaning that the true number of Russian fatalities is believed to be higher. The researchers themselves estimate that the open-source name count captures between 45 and 65 per cent of actual deaths.
In a separate estimate published on May 9, 2026 using Russian probate-registry data, Mediazona and Meduza calculated that approximately 352,000 Russian military personnel had been killed by the end of 2025. That figure combines 261,000 deaths registered through the standard civil procedure with about 90,000 men declared dead or missing by the courts in the absence of a body.
Researchers attribute the lag in identification partly to changes in battlefield tactics.
Increased use of drones and small-unit infiltration operations has left many bodies unrecovered for extended periods, delaying official records and public announcements. Analysts refer to a “grey zone” stretching tens of kilometres, from which recovery is hampered or impossible.
The backlog is visible in the outlet’s own workload. It has confirmed more than 77,000 deaths since the start of 2026, though no more than 10 per cent of those men died this year.
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) director Anne Keast-Butler said in the British agency’s first annual lecture at Bletchley Park, southeast England, on May 27, 2026 that new intelligence showed almost half a million Russian soldiers had been killed since the start of the war.
The Ukrainian General Staff reports overall Russian personnel losses of about 1,467,320 as of August 16, 2026, though it does not break the figure down by category.
Kyiv gives far lower figures for its own losses. Volodymyr Zelensky told Fox News on July 31, 2026 that Ukraine had lost about 50,000 soldiers killed and 400,000 wounded, after putting the number of dead at 55,000 in February.
Neither the Russian defence ministry nor the Kremlin has commented on the latest Mediazona-BBC tally.
Moscow has not released comprehensive casualty figures since the early months of the war.
Both Russia and Ukraine treat their own losses as a state secret.
