The death toll among Russian military personnel serving in Ukraine has passed 50,000, according to a joint investigation by BBC Russian, independent Russian media group Mediazona and associated volunteers, published on 17 April 2024.
The figures, which counted Russian military deaths in Ukraine since the Ukrainian invasion began in February 2022, were derived by investigators combing through open-source information from official reports, newspapers and social media as well as the examination of new graves in 70 cemeteries across Russia. The analysis does not include the deaths of pro-Russian militia in the Russian-occupied Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine.
The investigation found that the body count was more than 27,300 in the second year of the Russian campaign – 25% higher than in the first year – mainly due to the Russian ‘meat grinder’ strategy of throwing thousands of poorly trained conscripts into the campaign.
A sharp spike in Russian deaths occurred around January 2023, when the Russian military began a large-scale offensive in Donetsk using ineffective ‘human wave’ frontal assaults.
Another significant spike occurred in the spring of 2023, when the Wagner mercenary group helped Russia capture the city of Bakhmut.
The BBC estimates at least two in five of Russia’s dead soldiers are people who had nothing to do with the country’s military before the invasion.
When the Wagner Group recruited prisoners for the war and gave them a few weeks of military training under a scheme led by Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, half of those prisoners died within three months, the analysis found.
Prigozhin then staged an aborted mutiny against Russia’s armed forces in June 2023 and subsequently died in a suspicious plane crash on 23 August 2023.
When the Russian Ministry of Defence (MoD) then took up the Wagner strategy of recruiting prisoners, however, half of those troops died within two months. The Russian MoD’s ‘Storm platoons’, consisting almost entirely of convicts, generally received very little training, the BBC/Mediazona analysis found, with some prison recruits sent directly to the front line.
Wagner prison recruits were contracted for six months of fighting, after which they would then be given their freedom, while prisoners recruited by the Russian MoD since September 2023 are expected to fight until they die or the war is over.
The Russian death toll of 50,000 in Ukraine in just over two years of fighting compares with the total 14,453 official fatalities suffered by the Soviet military during its campaign in Afghanistan, which ran for more than nine years from December 1979.
