Over 200 Russian men have lost their lives since the start of the mobilisation in the country, which was declared two months ago, according to some most conservative estimates. No less than 159 children have been left fatherless, Novaya-Europe’s data team has calculated using open sources.
Over the past two months, at least 15 mobilised fathers of many children have lost their lives in Ukraine and military units. Children became orphans in at least 91 families.
At least 217 men who received draft cards have died since 21 September, according to our calculations. It took them no longer than 23.5 days to lose their lives starting from leaving home on average.
Vasily Zhukov from Miass, an industrial city in the Urals, was mobilised on 29 September. He died on 13 October, 15 days after the draft. It took almost a month for Zhukov’s body to be transported home for burial. Vasily had three children: a teenage son who had just finished school, and two daughters, the younger being only 8 months old.
Vasily Zhukov. Source: social media
Fathers of three or more children aged under 16 were promised a draft deferment in October. Vasily was not eligible for it anyway as his son turned 16 in July.
The daily death toll peaked on 24 October when at least 24 men lost their lives. Nine of them were drafted in the Volgograd region. Readers of the regional media outlets wrote that a convoy with the mobilised might have come under attack in Ukraine’s Kherson region.
The regions in the Urals have suffered most casualties. Sixty mobilised from the Yekaterinburg region and 27 from the Chelyabinsk region have been confirmed to be dead. Also, at least 32 dead men hailed from the regions of Volgograd and Rostov-on-Don. This selection can be explained by the good work of the local media which regularly report losses among the mobilised.
We have counted media reports with references to officials (employees of military registration and enlistment offices, district administrations, and even forensic medical examination bureaus) and documents, as well as reports of funerals found on social media and official statements.
Only reports of the mobilised Russian citizens are included in the count. If a man was reported to have gone to war without a draft card by his relatives, we considered him a volunteer and did not include him in the database. For instance, we did not consider those who died of the manslaughter at the training ground in the Belgorod region as there are no reliable reports that those were precisely mobilised citizens, and not volunteers.
When counting orphans, we used public obituaries or dead reports. If the obituary said that the man was “the best father” but didn’t give any details, we counted them as having one child.