By Erika Kinetz, BRUSSELS Belgium
Nearly 50,000 Russian men have
died in the war in Ukraine, according to the first independent statistical
analysis of Russia’s war dead.
Two independent Russian media outlets, Mediazona and Meduza, working with a data scientist from Germany’s Tübingen University, used Russian government data to shed light on one of Moscow’s closest-held secrets — the true human cost of its invasion of Ukraine.
To do so, they relied on a
statistical concept popularized during the COVID-19 pandemic called excess
mortality. Drawing on inheritance records and official mortality data, they
estimated how many more men under age 50 died between February 2022 and May 2023
than normal.
Neither
Moscow nor Kyiv gives timely data on military losses, and each is at pains to
amplify the other side’s casualties. Russia has publicly acknowledged the
deaths of just over 6,000 soldiers. Reports about military losses have been
repressed in Russian media, activists and independent journalists say.
Documenting the dead has become an act of defiance; those who do so face
harassment and potential criminal charges.
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.
“These are only soldiers who we know by name, and their deaths in each case are verified by multiple sources,” said Dmitry Treshchanin, an editor at Mediazona who helped oversee the investigation. “The estimate we did with Meduza allows us to see the ‘hidden’ deaths, deaths the Russian government is so obsessively and unsuccessfully trying to hide.”
To come up with a more
comprehensive tally, journalists from Mediazona and Meduza obtained records of
inheritance cases filed with the Russian authorities. Their data from the
National Probate Registry contained information about more than 11 million people
who died between 2014 and May 2023.
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.
That surge is roughly in line
with a May assessment by the White House that more than 20,000 Russians had
been killed in Ukraine since December, though lower than U.S. and U.K.
intelligence assessments of overall Russian deaths.
In February, the U.K. Ministry
of Defense said approximately 40,000 to 60,000 Russians had likely been killed
in the war. A leaked assessment from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency put
the number of Russians killed in action in the first year of the war at 35,000
to 43,000.
“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.
Casualties among inmates, first recruited by Wagner and now by the MoD, are
also a very hazy subject, with a lot of potential for manipulation. Statistics
could actually give better results.”
Many Russian fatalities - as
well as amputations - could have been prevented with better front-line first
aid, the U.K. Ministry of Defense said in an intelligence assessment published
Monday. Russia has suffered an average of around 400 casualties a day for 17
months, creating a “crisis” in combat medical care that is likely undermining
medical services for civilians in border regions near Ukraine, the ministry
said.
Independently, Dmitry Kobak, a
data scientist from Germany’s Tübingen University who has published work on
excess COVID-19 deaths in Russia, obtained mortality data broken down by age
and sex for 2022 from Rosstat, Russia’s official statistics agency.
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.
The COVID-19 pandemic made it harder to figure out how many men would have died in Russia since February 2022 if there hadn’t been a war. Both analyses corrected for the lingering effects of COVID on mortality by indexing male death rates against female deaths.
Sergei Scherbov, a scholar at the
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, cautioned that
“differences in the number of deaths between males and females can vary
significantly due to randomness alone.”
“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.
Russians who are missing but
not officially recognized as dead, as well as citizens of Ukraine fighting in
units of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics, are not included in
these counts.
Kobak acknowledged that some
uncertainties remain, especially for deaths of older men. Moreover, it’s hard
to know how many missing Russian soldiers are actually dead. But he said
neither factor is likely to have a huge impact.
“That uncertainty is in the
thousands,” he said. “The results are plausible overall.”
Asked by the Associated Press
on Monday about the Meduza and Mediazona study, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov
said during a conference call with reporters he wasn’t aware of it as the
Kremlin had “stopped monitoring” Meduza. Peskov also refused to comment on the
number of deaths mentioned in the study, saying only that “the Defense Ministry
gives the numbers, and they’re the only ones who have that prerogative.”
Meduza is an independent
Russian media outlet that has been operating in exile for eight years, with
headquarters in Riga, Latvia. In April 2021, Russian authorities designated
Meduza a “foreign agent,” making it harder to generate advertising income, and
in January 2023, the Kremlin banned Meduza as an illegal “undesirable
organization.”
Moscow has also labeled
independent outlet Mediazona as a “foreign agent” and blocked its website after
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
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