How many Russian soldiers died in the war with Ukraine

On October 6, the Ukrainian project “I Want to Live” published a table of the Russian army’s aggregate losses for the first eight months of 2025.

According to this document, whose source remains unknown, the Russian army lost 86,744 troops killed, 33,966 missing in action, 2,311 taken prisoner, and a further 158,529 hospitalised.

We almost never count the missing, captured, or wounded (as there are no reliable methods for their continuous accounting; we only touch on this topic occasionally), so the number of killed is of the greatest interest here.

“I Want to Live” has previously published internal documents of the Russian army—and some of them have withstood scrutiny (for example, lists of the dead in specific units). It is considerably more difficult to speak to the authenticity of this document: as it is a statistical summary without specific names, we cannot compare it with our database or the Probate Register.

We are also not yet able to speak about the Russian Armed Forces’ losses in 2025 using our obituary search method. Due to publication delays and the speed of our processing, our knowledge of 2025 is very limited. We are still finding and processing obituaries from previous years of the war, and the longer the fighting continues, the more of our effort is spent clearing a backlog of obituaries from previous years.

In 2025, we have so far added about 50,000 unique obituaries to our own open-source count; more than half of these (27,000) were for deaths that occurred between 2022 and 2024. At the same time, we know that the fighting this year has been even more intense than last year, and losses have continued to mount.

Our primary method for estimating Russia’s actual losses, conducted jointly with Meduza, uses Russia’s national Probate Register. According to this methodology, Russia’s losses in 2024 were at least 100,000 people, and for the first half of 2025 (based on preliminary and incomplete data), around 52,000 deaths.

The losses for 2025 presented in the document from “I Want to Live” are significantly higher, but theoretically, such a level of loss is possible, albeit at the very highest end of any plausible range. Our Probate Register estimate does not capture deaths that occurred in the most recent months and weeks before the calculation. We will be able to provide a more definitive number of the dead for 2025 next year.

We (as well as the Conflict Intelligence Team) also noted anomalies in the figures from the “I Want to Live” document. We ran a statistical check based on Benford’s law, a method sometimes used to identify ballot stuffing in Russian elections. This revealed minor anomalies.

To simplify, the numbers in the document end in “5” and “0” more often than would be statistically expected, though the sample size is very small. Nevertheless, this anomaly could also be explained by Russian officers doctoring data (if the document is authentic), rounding off figures in their reports.

Another statistical quirk: in three different groups of forces, three separate and unrelated units each reported exactly 182 personnel killed. While such a coincidence is not impossible—it can be explained by a statistical phenomenon known as the “birthday paradox”—it still warrants scrutiny. Beyond the figures themselves, the document’s very structure is questionable from a bureaucratic standpoint. It is missing several columns one would expect in an official loss summary, such as data on deserters. Military analyst Alexei Alshansky, who has direct experience with Russian military paperwork, argues that such a document is unlikely to exist in this form, as it lacks a clear addressee, formal requisites, or an identifiable purpose within the military chain of command.

Our skepticism is also rooted in a strict verification methodology that prevents us from accepting leaked lists at face value. As a rule, we do not incorporate data unless each individual fatality can be confirmed by a second, open Russian source. For example, when “I Want to Live” previously published a nominal list for the 15th Motor Rifle Brigade, we considered it authentic but only integrated the names we could independently cross-verify. This painstaking process means we contend with a significant processing delay; our current backlog stands at over 17,500 unconfirmed obituaries. For this reason, we cannot yet speak authoritatively on the full scale of 2025 losses and will likely only be able to offer a reliable assessment in 2026.

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 October 10, 2025, the death of 5,814 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 12 Russian generals have been officially confirmed: three Lieutenant Generals, seven Major Generals, and two who had retired from active service.

Lieutenant General Oleg Tsokov, deputy commander of the Southern Military District, was killed in July 2023. 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.

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 who was killed in June 2024.

The date of death is known in over 105,200 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 the data of the last few weeks is the most incomplete and may change significantly in the future.

The age of the deceased is mentioned in 115,850 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.