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Brussels: Nearly 50,000 Russian men perished in war in Ukraine, according to the first independent statistical analysis of war dead in Russia.
Two independent Russian media, Medizuna and Medusa, work with A.M data A scientist from Germany’s University of Tübingen used Russian government data to shed light on one MoscowClosest Secrets – The true human cost of invading Ukraine.
To do this, they relied on a statistical concept popularized during the COVID-19 pandemic called excess mortality. Drawing on inheritance records and official death data, they estimated that more men under the age of 50 died between February 2022 and May 2023 than usual.
Neither Moscow nor Kiev provides timely data on military losses, and each is doing its best to inflate the losses of the other side. Russia has publicly acknowledged the deaths of just over 6,000 soldiers. Activists and independent journalists said that reports of military casualties were suppressed in the Russian media. Documenting the dead has become an act of defiance, and those who do so face harassment and possible criminal charges.
Despite these challenges, Medizona and the BBC’s Russian Service, working with a network of volunteers, used social media posts and photos of cemeteries across Russia to build a database of confirmed war dead. As of July 7, they had identified 27,423 dead Russian soldiers.
“These are only soldiers we know by name, and their deaths have been verified in each case by several sources,” said Dmitry Treshanin, a Medizona editor who helped oversee the investigation. “The estimate we’ve done with Meduza allows us to see ‘hidden’ deaths, deaths that the Russian government obsessively and unsuccessfully tries to cover up.”
To come up with a more comprehensive tally, the journalists from Medizona and Medusa obtained records of inheritance cases filed with the Russian authorities. Their data, from the National Wills Registry, contained information on more than 11 million people who died between 2014 and May 2023.
According to their analysis, 25,000 more genetics cases were opened in 2022 for males between the ages of 15 and 49 than expected. By May 27, 2023, the number of excess cases had risen to 47,000.
The increase is roughly in line with a May White House assessment that more than 20,000 Russians have been killed in Ukraine since December, though it is lower than US and British intelligence assessments of the total Russian death toll.
In February, the British Ministry of Defense said that approximately 40,000 to 60,000 Russians had been killed in the war. A leaked assessment from the US Defense Intelligence Agency put the number of Russian combat deaths in the first year of the war at between 35,000 and 43,000.
“Their numbers may or may not be accurate,” Medizona editor Trechanin said in an email. “Even if they have sources in the Russian Defense Ministry, their own data may be incomplete. It is very difficult to collect all the casualties from the military, and Rosgvardia, the Akhmat battalion, several PMCs, of which Wagner is the largest, but not the only one. Victims among prisoners, first recruited by Wagner and now the Ministry of Defense, is also a very vague subject, with a lot of possibilities for manipulation. Statistics can give results. Better actually.”
Many Russian deaths – as well as amputations – could have been averted, Britain’s Ministry of Defense said in an intelligence assessment published on Monday, with improved first-line first aid. Russia has suffered an average of 400 casualties per day for 17 months, the ministry said, causing a “crisis” in combat medical care that is likely to undermine medical services for civilians in border regions near Ukraine.
Independently, Dmitry Kopac, a data scientist from Germany’s University of Tübingen who has published work on excess deaths by COVID-19 in Russia, obtained death data broken down by age and sex for 2022 from Rosstat, Russia’s official statistics agency.
It found that 24,000 more men over 50 died in 2022 than expected, a number consistent with analysis of inheritance data.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made it difficult to know how many men would have died in Russia since February 2022 if there had been no war. Both analyzes were corrected for the continuing effects of COVID on mortality by indexing males death rates for female mortality.
“Differences in the number of deaths between males and females can vary greatly due to randomness alone,” warns Sergei Cherbov, a researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.
“I’m not saying there can’t be an excess number of male deaths,” he said, “but statistically speaking, this difference in mortality could just be the result of chance.”
Russians missing but not officially recognized as dead, as well as citizens of Ukraine fighting in units of the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk republics, are not included in these charges.
Koback acknowledged that there were still some uncertainties, especially regarding the deaths of older men. Moreover, it is difficult to know how many missing Russian soldiers actually died. But he said neither factor was likely to have a significant impact.
“This uncertainty is in the thousands,” he said. “The results are generally reasonable.”
The Russian Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Meduza is an independent Russian media outlet that has been in exile for eight years, based in Riga, Latvia. In April 2021, Russian authorities designated Meduza a “foreign agent”, making it difficult to monetize advertising, and in January 2023, the Kremlin banned Meduza as an illegal “undesirable organization”.
Moscow also designated independent outlet Medizona as a “foreign agent” and blocked its website after Russia’s sweeping invasion of Ukraine.
Two independent Russian media, Medizuna and Medusa, work with A.M data A scientist from Germany’s University of Tübingen used Russian government data to shed light on one MoscowClosest Secrets – The true human cost of invading Ukraine.
To do this, they relied on a statistical concept popularized during the COVID-19 pandemic called excess mortality. Drawing on inheritance records and official death data, they estimated that more men under the age of 50 died between February 2022 and May 2023 than usual.
Neither Moscow nor Kiev provides timely data on military losses, and each is doing its best to inflate the losses of the other side. Russia has publicly acknowledged the deaths of just over 6,000 soldiers. Activists and independent journalists said that reports of military casualties were suppressed in the Russian media. Documenting the dead has become an act of defiance, and those who do so face harassment and possible criminal charges.
Despite these challenges, Medizona and the BBC’s Russian Service, working with a network of volunteers, used social media posts and photos of cemeteries across Russia to build a database of confirmed war dead. As of July 7, they had identified 27,423 dead Russian soldiers.
“These are only soldiers we know by name, and their deaths have been verified in each case by several sources,” said Dmitry Treshanin, a Medizona editor who helped oversee the investigation. “The estimate we’ve done with Meduza allows us to see ‘hidden’ deaths, deaths that the Russian government obsessively and unsuccessfully tries to cover up.”
To come up with a more comprehensive tally, the journalists from Medizona and Medusa obtained records of inheritance cases filed with the Russian authorities. Their data, from the National Wills Registry, contained information on more than 11 million people who died between 2014 and May 2023.
According to their analysis, 25,000 more genetics cases were opened in 2022 for males between the ages of 15 and 49 than expected. By May 27, 2023, the number of excess cases had risen to 47,000.
The increase is roughly in line with a May White House assessment that more than 20,000 Russians have been killed in Ukraine since December, though it is lower than US and British intelligence assessments of the total Russian death toll.
In February, the British Ministry of Defense said that approximately 40,000 to 60,000 Russians had been killed in the war. A leaked assessment from the US Defense Intelligence Agency put the number of Russian combat deaths in the first year of the war at between 35,000 and 43,000.
“Their numbers may or may not be accurate,” Medizona editor Trechanin said in an email. “Even if they have sources in the Russian Defense Ministry, their own data may be incomplete. It is very difficult to collect all the casualties from the military, and Rosgvardia, the Akhmat battalion, several PMCs, of which Wagner is the largest, but not the only one. Victims among prisoners, first recruited by Wagner and now the Ministry of Defense, is also a very vague subject, with a lot of possibilities for manipulation. Statistics can give results. Better actually.”
Many Russian deaths – as well as amputations – could have been averted, Britain’s Ministry of Defense said in an intelligence assessment published on Monday, with improved first-line first aid. Russia has suffered an average of 400 casualties per day for 17 months, the ministry said, causing a “crisis” in combat medical care that is likely to undermine medical services for civilians in border regions near Ukraine.
Independently, Dmitry Kopac, a data scientist from Germany’s University of Tübingen who has published work on excess deaths by COVID-19 in Russia, obtained death data broken down by age and sex for 2022 from Rosstat, Russia’s official statistics agency.
It found that 24,000 more men over 50 died in 2022 than expected, a number consistent with analysis of inheritance data.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made it difficult to know how many men would have died in Russia since February 2022 if there had been no war. Both analyzes were corrected for the continuing effects of COVID on mortality by indexing males death rates for female mortality.
“Differences in the number of deaths between males and females can vary greatly due to randomness alone,” warns Sergei Cherbov, a researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.
“I’m not saying there can’t be an excess number of male deaths,” he said, “but statistically speaking, this difference in mortality could just be the result of chance.”
Russians missing but not officially recognized as dead, as well as citizens of Ukraine fighting in units of the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk republics, are not included in these charges.
Koback acknowledged that there were still some uncertainties, especially regarding the deaths of older men. Moreover, it is difficult to know how many missing Russian soldiers actually died. But he said neither factor was likely to have a significant impact.
“This uncertainty is in the thousands,” he said. “The results are generally reasonable.”
The Russian Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Meduza is an independent Russian media outlet that has been in exile for eight years, based in Riga, Latvia. In April 2021, Russian authorities designated Meduza a “foreign agent”, making it difficult to monetize advertising, and in January 2023, the Kremlin banned Meduza as an illegal “undesirable organization”.
Moscow also designated independent outlet Medizona as a “foreign agent” and blocked its website after Russia’s sweeping invasion of Ukraine.
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