Russian losses in the war with Ukraine.
Mediazona count, updated

For this update, we have added over 6,000 names to our database. This spike is not related to the current situation on the frontline, but rather to the fact that we have mass-processed posts about missing soldiers and added those whose deaths have been confirmed through the Probate Registry and other sources.

Important note: as before, we do not count those missing in action. All these added people have died and are either buried or recognised as deceased in the absence of a body. These are the same kinds of records as the rest, we simply use a public missing-person post as a source for the soldier’s full name and details, and then check whether their death has been confirmed.

In the data we’ve collected, there are still relatively few fatalities recorded for 2026: right now, we have only 6,600 records of Russian military personnel with known dates of death who died this year, and since the last update, we added 631 people. For comparison: in 2024, we know of 95,600 deaths, with 1,692 added in the last two weeks; 59,700 deaths for 2025, with 3,613 added. In other words, the losses for this year make up a very small portion of our update.

Why are the recorded losses for this year so low in comparison? There are several reasons, but they all come down to one: the nature of the war has changed. Combat operations are being conducted in a strip known as the “grey zone” or “kill zone”, evacuating bodies from this territory is virtually impossible until full control is established, and the front is moving at an increasingly slower pace.

A backlog is also accumulating on our end: there are so many obituaries that we do not have time to process them all.

But the main reason for the lag in our numbers is that the death of any given individual is being registered with a growing delay. And to show how this happens, we selected one of the lists published by the Ukrainian project “I Want to Live” (“Khochu Zhit”).

The project posted this leak on April 17. The post claims that the 5,007 names are inmates recruited into the Russian army “in one of the months of this year.” We verified that at least 4,000 men from this list actually exist, and from then on we worked specifically with this shortened version of the leak.

The first check showed that almost all of these people were alive as of January 1, 2026.

On April 26, we cross-referenced this list for the first time with the Probate registry and state databases. This check revealed that 118 people had died in 2026.

Here is the result of the next check on May 20: the number of confirmed deaths increased by 80, with the majority of them occurring between January and March.

The third check, about a month later, already showed 352 dead. The trend continued: the people from the “I Want to Live” list were dying in January-March.

We did the latest check just before publishing this update, on September 10. Now, there are already 807 people on the list of the dead, which is one in five out of the 4,000.

In the first three months of 2026, 682 people died, or 84.5% of the known losses: 81 in January, 316 in February, and 285 in March. And only 125 people (15.5%) died in May–August.

In our database, built from publicly available verifiable sources like obituaries, only 112 of the 807 people are present (that is one in seven). It is obvious that public information about deaths appears even later than the official registration of death.

It is evident that over time the graph grows “upwards”, meaning we are mostly recording the deaths of people who actually died back in winter and early spring. Naturally, the data we’ve collected cannot be exhaustive, and we expect that information about the dead from this list will continue to be added. We do not expect to see the final picture of these losses for another two years.

How can it be explained that people from this list suddenly began dying en masse in the winter of 2026? First, there is no doubt that these people definitely died in the war. From obituaries, we know they were assigned to various military units: for example, the 254th Motorised Rifle regiment, the 15th Motorised Rifle brigade, the 5th Motorised Rifle brigade, and others. This means it’s impossible to tie these losses to a specific military formation. Nor is there data about particularly fierce battles in January–March: the intensity of combat operations did not decrease, but neither did it increase.

The simplest explanation: these people were indeed recruited over a short period of time (not necessarily within one month, as “I Want to Live” claims), assigned to assault units after brief training, and thrown into battle. The relatively small share of deaths after March suggests that the majority of these servicemen were either killed, severely wounded, or found a way to leave the assault troops. And new reinforcements came to take their place.

What we know about losses

The map below shows the distribution of casualties across Russia’s regions. These are absolute figures and have not been adjusted for population or number of military units.

You can filter the map to show total losses, losses by branch of service, or the home regions of mobilised soldiers who were killed.

In most cases, official reports or visual cues like uniforms and insignia allow us to determine a soldier’s branch of service, or how he came to be in the army (mobilised, volunteer, prisoner, etc.).

The chart below compares these different groups of servicemen.

From early summer and into the mid-fall season of 2022, volunteers bore the brunt of the losses, which is strikingly different from the situation in the initial stage of the war: in winter and early spring, the Airborne Forces suffered the greatest damage, followed by the Motorised Rifle troops.

By the end of 2022 and the beginning of the next year, losses among prisoners recruited into the Wagner PMC increased markedly. They were formed into “assault groups” to overwhelm Ukrainian positions near Bakhmut.

By March 2023, prisoners became the largest category of war losses. After the capture of Bakhmut, there have been no cases of mass use of prisoners so far.

By September 2024, volunteers once again emerged as the largest category among the KIA. This shift reflects a cumulative effect: prison recruitment had significantly waned, no new mobilisation had been announced, yet the stream of volunteers continued unabated.

By September 11, 2026, the death of 7,656 officers of the Russian army and other security agencies had been confirmed.

The proportion of officer deaths among overall casualties has steadily declined since the conflict began. In the early stages, when professional contract soldiers formed the main invasion force, officers accounted for up to 10% of fatalities. By November 2024, this figure had dropped to between 2–3%—a shift that reflects both evolving combat tactics and the intensive recruitment of volunteer infantry, who suffer casualty rates many times higher than their commanding officers.

Officers killed in Ukraine

To date, the deaths of 15 Russian generals have been officially confirmed: five Lieutenant Generals, seven Major Generals, two who had retired from active service, and one Ukrainian SBU general who had fled to Russia.

Lieutenant General Oleg Tsokov, deputy commander of the Southern Military District, was killed in July 2023—the first officer of that rank to die in the war. In December 2024, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, head of the Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical (NBC) Protection Troops, was killed by a bomb in Moscow. Lieutenant General Yaroslav Moskalik, a senior officer in the General Staff’s Main Operational Directorate, was killed by a car bomb in a Moscow suburb in April 2025. In December 2025, Lieutenant General Fanil Sarvarov, head of the Operational Training Directorate of the Russian General Staff, was killed in Moscow by a car bomb. On March 31, 2026, Lieutenant General Alexander Otroschenko, commander of the mixed aviation corps of the Northern Fleet, was killed in the crash of an An-26 transport aircraft in Crimea.

Two deputy army commanders, Major General Andrei Sukhovetsky (41st Army) and Major General Vladimir Frolov (8th Army), were killed in the first weeks of the war. In June 2022, Major General Roman Kutuzov was killed in an attack on a troop formation.

Major General Sergei Goryachev, chief of staff of the 35th Combined Arms Army, was killed in June 2023 while commanding forces against the Ukrainian counter-offensive in the Zaporizhzhia region. In November 2023, Major General Vladimir Zavadsky, deputy commander of the 14th Army Corps, was killed near the village of Krynky.

In November 2024, Major General Pavel Klimenko, commander of the 5th Separate Motorised Rifle Brigade (formerly the “Oplot” Brigade of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic), was fatally wounded by an FPV drone.

In July 2025, a strike on the headquarters of the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade killed at least six officers, including the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy, Mikhail Gudkov.

The two retired generals on the list are Kanamat Botashev, a pilot who had been dismissed for crashing a fighter jet and was fighting for Wagner PMC when his Su-25 was shot down in May 2022, and Andrei Golovatsky, a former Interior Ministry general serving an 8.5-year prison sentence (but maintained his rank) who was killed in June 2024.

On March 17, 2026, SBU Major General Volodymyr Lyapkin was killed in the Kherson region. Until February 2014, Lyapkin headed a department in the Ukrainian special services, but after the victory of the Maidan revolution, he fled to Russia. After the war began, he served in the occupation administration of Kherson and then transferred to the “Bars-33” unit.

The date of death is known in 231,300 cases. While this data does not capture the full daily reality of the war, it does suggest which periods saw the most intense fighting.

Please note that data for the most recent months is most incomplete and will change significantly in the future.

The age of the deceased is mentioned in 234,600 reports. For the first six months of the war, when the fighting was done by the regular army, the 21-23 age group accounted for the most deaths.

Volunteers and mobilised men are significantly older: people voluntarily go to war over 30, and the mobilised are generally over 25.