Around 120,000 Russian troops have been killed since the launch of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to a report by independent Russian media outlets Meduza and Mediazona on July 5.
Meduza and Mediazona, together with BBC News Russian, have long been documenting the names of Russian soldiers killed fighting in Ukraine through open-source research.
In February, the outlets estimated that 83,000 Russian soldiers had been killed, based on analysis of a restricted but non-classified database of inheritance cases.
They then compared trends to those in publicly available mortality data from Russia’s State Statistics Service, records from the Russian Probate Registry, and obituaries.
On June 28, they provided the names of over 56,000 Russian soldiers that had been killed since 2022.
Meduza and Mediazona have since updated its data collection method, as the time and resources required to trawl the data when it becomes available produces a significant lag, sometimes of six months.
They have now produced a new method to create "flash estimates."
"According to our latest calculations, as of the end of June, approximately 120,000 Russian servicemen have died in the war since 2022, but the real number could be as high as 140,000," Meduza wrote.
Ukraine's General Staff estimates that the Russian military's personnel losses surpassed 500,000 on May 25, 2024.
The overall consensus is that it includes dead, wounded, missing and captured.
In February, Zelensky said that 180,000 Russian troops had been killed since the start of the all-out war. The president said that over 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers were killed during the same time.
Western officials gave similar estimates about Russian battlefield losses.
Leo Docherty, British minister of state for the Armed Forces, said in late April the U.K estimates Russian losses to be over 450,000.
“We estimate that approximately 450,000 Russian military personnel have been killed or wounded, and tens of thousands more have already deserted since the start of the conflict," Docherty said in parliament.
"The number of personnel killed serving in Russian private military companies (PMCs) is not clear," he added.
A U.S. estimate reported on Dec. 12 put the total at 315,000. On the same day, the Ukrainian figure was 340,650.
Chris York
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