As the Russian military continues its so-called “meat grinder” strategy of sending wave after wave of infantry units to wear down Ukrainian forces, researchers using open-source intelligence have confirmed the deaths of over 70,000 Russian troops since the start of the war, BBC News Russian reported on Friday.
Working with Russian independent news outlet Mediazona, BBC News Russian said it had been able to identify the names of 70,112 Russian soldiers killed in combat in Ukraine by analysing obituaries and other Russian media reports, as well as information shared by the Russian authorities and relatives of the deceased, although it stressed that the actual number of deaths was likely to be “considerably higher”.
Around 20% of those killed since the start of the war were volunteers, most of whom were aged between 42 and 50 and came from small towns in areas of Russia where “stable, well-paid work is hard to find”.
The death toll of those who had enlisted voluntarily began to rise in October 2023, with over 100 volunteer recruits killed every week since then, BBC News Russian added.
Soldiers who spoke to the BBC attributed the rising volunteer deaths to Russia’s continued “meat grinder” strategy, whereby it sends large groups of soldiers to attack Ukrainian positions, often with “little or no equipment or support from artillery or military vehicles”.
Freed convicts, who previously accounted for more deaths than contract soldiers, volunteers, mercenaries, or mobilised reservists, now account for 19% of those known to have died in Ukraine, having been killed in particularly large numbers in early 2023. Mobilised reservists represented 13% of the total death toll, the BBC said.
Since illegal migrants detained in Russia have been routinely “promised they will not be deported and are offered a simplified route to citizenship if they survive the war”, according to the BBC, some 272 of those killed were citizens of other countries, half of whom were from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan.
While neither Russia nor Ukraine publish official data on their own combat losses, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that the total number of killed or wounded soldiers on both sides had reached almost 1 million, with an estimated 80,000 Ukrainian troops and 200,000 Russian troops killed, and some 400,000 wounded on each side.