Ukrainian troops take part in military training at an undisclosed location in eastern Ukraine, 27 March 2025. Photo: EPA-EFE / 24th Mechanised Brigade
An open-source intelligence project run by independent news outlet Mediazona and BBC News Russian has confirmed the deaths of 100,001 Russian soldiers in Ukraine, Mediazona announced on Friday.
The death toll produced by the project’s findings, which cover the period until 28 March, are likely to be far from complete, Mediazona warned, noting that researchers had “collated over 10,000 new obituaries, but these numbers cannot just be added on as some of the information has been duplicated.”
The project, the creation of which was prompted by the Russian Defence Ministry’s decision to no longer publish the death toll in Ukraine in late 2022, uses publicly available records, reports in Russian media outlets and methods such as checking cemeteries for new war dead to source its figures.
“Both state-affiliated actors and online trolls have attempted to “poison” our database by inserting fabricated obituaries, hoping to discredit the project by making it seem unreliable or easily manipulated,” Mediazona wrote, adding that in one case, a fake obituary for a certain “Ilya Moskovtsev,” was discovered, “whose image was unmistakably that of Elon Musk, crudely photoshopped into a Russian soldier’s portrait”.
Both Meduza and Mediazona have estimated that the real number of Russian soldiers to have died in the three years of war in Ukraine is likely to be closer to 160,000 based on an analysis of excess male mortality figures.
In December, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky disclosed that approximately 43,000 Ukrainian military personnel had been killed since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
At the same time, Zelensky also estimated Russian losses in the war so far, saying that he believed 198,000 Russian military personnel had been killed and that over 550,000 Russian troops had been wounded.
