Journalists identified the names of 40,500 Russians who died in Ukraine

Losses of the Russian army in the war in Ukraine on December 29 amounted to 40,559 people, the Russian service of the BBC and Mediazon reported. These are only those whose names have been established through open sources. The real number of casualties can be at least one and a half to two times higher, the investigators emphasize.

Since the last summary, over the past two weeks, 1,175 names have been added to the list of casualties. Among them are five officers in the rank of lieutenant colonel and higher.

Summing up the year, journalists report that 2023 was more bloody for the Russian army than 2022. In the last summary of 2022, there were slightly more than 10,000 names in the list of the BBC and Mediazone. Now investigators can claim that at least 15,500 people died in 2022: already after the onset of 2023, they learned about another five thousand who died earlier.

“At the end of 2023, there are more than 40,500 names on our list, and we expect that the data for 2023 will also increase by at least a third – especially taking into account the last bloody storms. So we can say with confidence that this year Russian forces suffered even greater losses than in the first year of the war,” Mediazona writes.

The Russian service of the BBC and “Mediazon” keep a count of the number of dead since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion. They use only open data: official documents, messages from officials and mass media, publications of close relatives, and data from cemeteries. Journalists warn that these data are far from complete.

• Russia and Ukraine do not disclose war losses. The Ministry of Defense of Russia last reported on the total number of casualties on September 21 last year, announcing the death of 5,937 people. A relatively independent assessment of Ukrainian losses was last given in the spring. Then in the documents leaked online, supposedly containing the data of American intelligence, it was reported that Washington estimated the losses of the Ukrainian army at 15.5–17.5 thousand people killed and 109–113 thousand wounded.