Over 71,000 Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine, media report suggests

More than 71,000 Russian soldiers have been confirmed to have been killed in Ukraine amid the full-scale war, according to a report by independent Russian media outlet Mediazona on Sept.

27. Mediazona, along with BBC News Russian, has been documenting the names of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine through open-source research. Since Mediazona's last update in mid-September, the names of 1,998 Russian soldiers have been added to the list of casualties.

The journalists note that the actual figures are likely significantly higher, as their verified information comes from public sources such as obituaries, posts by relatives, regional media reports, and statements from local authorities. Since Russia began its all-out war against Ukraine over 4,100 officers have been killed in combat in Ukraine. The analysts also note that at least 13,175 Russian inmates have been killed on Ukraine's eastern front.

According to Mediazona's estimates, a majority of those killed in action come from Rostov, Sverdlovsk, Bashkiria, and Chelyabinsk oblasts, as well as the Buryatia republic. According to the journalist, a surge of recruitment by the Kremlin in the predominantly Muslim regions of Bashkortostan and Tatarstan have also showed an increase in those killed in action in recent months. The last few month, amid the renewed Kharkiv offensive as well as Ukraine's incursion into Kursk Oblast, Russian forces have experienced some of its heaviest losses since the start of the full-scale war.

According to undisclosed sources and Western intelligence estimates, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Sept.

17 that roughly 1 million Ukrainians and Russians have been killed or wounded since February 2022 - including civillians. The WSJ also claimed that 80,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died during the war and around 400,000 wounded - a number some Ukrainian lawmakers have rebuked as "exaggerated." In February of this year, President Volodymyr 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. As of Sept.

27, 2024, the Ukrainian military estimates Russian combat losses at 649,170 troops.