Independent Kremlin media claim to have identified more than 66,000 Russian soldiers killed since the start of the conflict

“As of August 30, we know the names of 66,471 Russian soldiers who died in the war.” The independent Russian website Mediazona, in collaboration with the BBC Russian service, claimed on Saturday August 31 on Telegram to have identified more than 66,000 Russian soldiers killed since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Their count, published in a joint investigation and stopped on August 30, comes from the exploitation of certain information, such as official press releases or publications in the media and on social networks, and from the observation of graves in cemeteries. In mid-April, the two media outlets had said they had identified more than 50,000 Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine since February 24, 2022. The two media outlets warn that their count does not claim to be exhaustive.

At the end of February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky estimated the number of Ukrainian servicemen killed at 31,000, while the Russian army has only very rarely communicated on its military losses and these figures are considered to be largely underestimated.

The Kremlin has invoked “the law on state secrets” And “the special regime” to justify the lack of official communication on Russian military losses. At the beginning of June, questioned on the subject during a meeting with international press agencies, Russian President Vladimir Putin refused to quantify Russian losses in Ukraine, stating only that they were “inferior” to Ukrainian losses in “a ratio of one to five”. In August 2023, the American daily The New York Timesciting U.S. officials, estimated Russian military losses at 120,000 dead.