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Based on open sources, the BBC Russian Service found out that the names of 2,120 Russian soldiers who died during the hostilities in Ukraine have already been confirmed. Every fifth is an officer.
This list has been maintained by the BBC and a team of volunteers since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The BBC based its analysis only on reports containing specific information about the deceased, including the full name and rank and, if possible, the place of burial.
Since the official authorities, the press and relatives do not always publicly report the dead, this list is clearly incomplete, and the real losses of the Russian army and the Russian Guard in Ukraine are higher. But the collected data helps us to analyze the main trends.
What’s new?
Since the beginning of May, official publications began to appear mentioning Russian volunteers who died in Ukraine (we do not include them in the list of Russian military dead).
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Previously, there were practically no such publications. The deaths of those who fought in Ukraine in units that are not part of the armed forces of Russia and the National Guard were reported only by friends and relatives of the victims on social networks.
On May 5, the governor of the Omsk region announced the death of reserve major Valery Statilko.
According to local media, Statilko, a 60-year-old retired airborne officer, died on April 24 during a mortar attack in the Izyum district of the Kharkiv region.
In Khakassia, they reported the death of Ilya Solomachev. “A volunteer militia who fought as part of the Don Cossack unit,” this is how local journalists described him.
Earlier, the BBC wrote that the recruitment of new people to participate in hostilities is now being actively conducted by both the Wagner PMC and the Russian Ministry of Defense.
But there is no reliable data on the losses of the Wagnerites, as well as those who serve in the military units of the self-proclaimed DPR and LPR.
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Main trends
The trends we noticed earlier persist:
- about 20% of the established dead are officers in the rank from junior lieutenant to general (but this does not mean that every fifth Russian who died in the war is an officer – we talked about this in more detail in a previous article);
- about 20% of the identified dead served in the airborne troops;
- most of the dead are from the depressed regions of Russia. Only three deaths from Moscow are known, although the inhabitants of the capital make up almost 9% of the population of Russia;
- the most commonly reported casualties are in Dagestan (at least 137 dead) and Buryatia (at least 98 dead);
- in some regions, journalists and relatives of the victims report cases of pressure on them by local administrations, demanding not to publish information about buried soldiers and officers);
The last time the Russian Ministry of Defense officially reported losses was on March 25, reporting the death of 1,351 servicemen.
Representatives of the armed forces of Ukraine call a much larger figure – more than 24 thousand dead Russian soldiers.
