Four years of war. 200,000 confirmed dead and the geography of Russian losses in the war with Ukraine

The Manticore leak

Throughout the war, the Russian state has made a concerted effort to conceal its losses, but in Russia, almost any information collected by the government eventually leaks. Military data is no exception.

Over the past four years, we have gathered hundreds of thousands of names from unit rosters leaked by deserters, Ukrainian intelligence publications, and endless social media posts from desperate relatives searching for missing soldiers. Yet, without definitive secondary confirmation, we could not add these names to our verified list. Tens of thousands of obituaries sat in our backlog, waiting to be processed and verified.

The breakthrough came via Manticore, one of Russia’s many illicit background check (or probiv) services. Manticore managed to obtain a massive data dump from the Russian Civil Registry (ZAGS), the state body responsible for issuing birth, marriage, and death certificates.

We requested that Manticore export all death certificates that explicitly listed Ukraine, or the Russian border regions of Kursk, Bryansk, and Belgorod, as the place of death. Cross-referencing this official registry leak with our existing backlog provided the definitive proof we needed. Simply by matching names to the ZAGS records, we were able to independently verify 23,000 new fatalities.

The leak, however, is not a complete picture. The database cuts off in early 2025, meaning casualties from the latter half of the year remain unaccounted for. Furthermore, roughly half of all death certificates omit the specific place of death entirely. Even with this new data, our figure of 200,000 remains a conservative floor, not a ceiling.

Mapping the war cost: from the Arctic to the Caucasus

To mark this grim anniversary, we have also tried to visualise the immense geographic footprint of this war.

Exactly a year ago, we made our casualty lists public, available in Russian at 200.zona.media. Now, by refining the geographic data collected by our volunteers, we have managed to map the hometowns of over 180,000 of the deceased. To establish these locations, we prioritised the place of residence mentioned in local obituaries, followed by official registration addresses from leaked state databases, birthplaces, and finally, burial sites.

Our data shows that death notices have arrived in at least 26,600 towns and villages across Russia—roughly 17% of all settlements in the country. There is not a single city left in Russia that has not suffered a loss; the only settlements without known casualties are rural villages.

The war has truly touched the entirety of Russia, stretching to its absolute geographic extremes:

In the North: Alexey Zharkov, 35, a senior rifleman killed near Avdiivka, hailed from the Arctic village of Syndassko in the Krasnoyarsk territory, the northernmost settlement in Russia.

In the South: Rustam Rustamov, 24, mobilised and killed in the Zaporizhzhia region, was from Kurush in Dagestan, Russia’s southernmost point.

In the West: Baltiysk, the country’s westernmost town in the Kaliningrad region enclave, has seen 63 confirmed deaths, predominantly from the 336th Naval Infantry Brigade stationed there.

In the East: From Uelen, the easternmost village on the Bering Strait—closer to the United States’ Alaska than to its own regional capital, Anadyr—three young men have been killed, including 19-year-old Alexander Ninek.

The data also reveals how the Russian army is replenishing its ranks from beyond its internationally recognised borders. We have geolocated recruits who enlisted from Kazakhstan, as well as fighters drawn from Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the regions of Georgia controlled by Moscow-backed proxy regimes.

The rural burden

Beyond geography, the data shows a stark social stratification. The burden of the war does not fall evenly across the Russian population; it is overwhelmingly borne by the remote provinces and the poor.

According to our geographic data, 68% of the deceased (122,700) were from urban areas, and 32% (57,500) from rural communities. While this roughly tracks the official demographic split (75% of Russians live in cities and 25% in villages) the reality is more skewed. Urban deaths are far more likely to be captured in our counts due to higher social media usage and more visible public obituaries, meaning rural casualties are likely underrepresented.

Furthermore, major metropolitan areas and cities with over a million residents remain largely untouched. When we isolate cities with a population of over 100,000, which account for over half the country’s population, they make up only one-third of the total military fatalities. The remaining two-thirds of the dead come from small towns, settlements, and rural villages.

This disparity is glaring across the regions with the highest absolute losses. In Bashkiria, which leads the grim tally with 7,700 confirmed deaths, 55% of the casualties come from villages, despite the rural population being only 40%. In Tatarstan (6,800 deaths), a third of the dead are rural, against a rural population of 23.6%.

When adjusted per capita, the burden falls disproportionately on impoverished republics with high numbers of volunteer recruits. Setting aside sparsely populated Chukotka in the Far East, the highest per capita losses are in Tyva (476 deaths per 100,000 residents), followed by Buryatia (400), Zabaikalsky krai (362), and the Altai Republic (316). The war machine relies heavily on men from these economically depressed areas, where the financial incentives of military contracts offer a rare, if potentially fatal, lifeline.

The hardest-hit settlements

The war’s devastating local impact is most evident in remote villages, where the loss of life is staggering relative to the population.

In Chikoy, a village in Buryatia near the Mongolian border, 10 men have been killed out of a population of just 525. Nearby Komsomolskoye has lost 9 men from the exact same population size. In the Komi Republic’s village of Kerchomya, 10 men have died out of 744 residents. Further east, in the Buryatian ulus of Khargana, 12 men have died out of 900 residents.

The largest settlement among the hardest hit is Nerchinsky Zavod in the Zabaikalsky krai, located 600 kilometres from Chita near the Chinese border. Out of a population of roughly 2,300, 31 residents have been killed in Ukraine.

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As the war enters its fifth year, the Russian military continues to sustain staggering losses. While the state goes to increasingly extreme lengths to hide the toll, the data, whether through geolocated graves or leaked civil registries, continues to speak for the dead.