Mediazona and the BBC have named nearly 283,000 Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine

Nearly 283,000 Russian soldiers killed in the war against Ukraine have now been identified by name by the independent Russian outlet Mediazona and the BBC’s Russian service. In the latest update, on Friday, October 23, the list the two keep together with a team of volunteers stands at exactly 282,993 dead.

It is a count, not an estimate. A name goes on the list only when the death is confirmed by a public source: an announcement by a Russian authority or Russian outlet, a post by a relative with matching details, a report on local pages with a photograph of the deceased or the date of the funeral, even photographs from cemeteries. Losses of the forces of the self-proclaimed “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk are left out, unless the dead man was a Russian citizen who volunteered there or was sent there after mobilisation. The compilers themselves note that the real number is higher, since many deaths never become public. For that reason they accompany the list with a separate estimate of excess male mortality, based on the probate registry and developed with Meduza, last updated in May with data to the end of 2025.

Where the dead come from

In absolute numbers, Bashkortostan is first among Russian regions with 11,905 dead, followed by Tatarstan with 10,003 and the Sverdlovsk region with 9,284. The date of death is known for 266,700 cases and the age for 268,000. In the first six months, when only the regular army was fighting, most of the dead were 21 to 23 years old. Volunteers and mobilised men who joined later are noticeably older.

The make-up of the dead changes as the war goes on. At the start, in the winter and early spring of 2022, the heaviest losses were suffered by the airborne forces and then the motorised infantry. From summer to mid-autumn 2022, most of the dead were volunteers. Toward the end of 2022 and early 2023, deaths rose sharply among the prisoners recruited by Wagner and sent in “assault groups” against Ukrainian positions near Bakhmut. In March 2023 they were the largest category of dead, but since the battle for Bakhmut no new mass use of prisoners has been recorded. By September 2024 volunteers were again the most numerous category: recruitment in prisons had been sharply reduced, no new mobilisation had been declared and volunteers kept coming without interruption.

Officers and generals

The list also includes more than 7,900 army officers and officers of other security services. Their share is steadily falling: up to 10% of the dead at the start of the invasion, when the attack was carried out mainly by a professional contract army, and only 2-3% by November 2024. The compilers attribute this to the changing character of the fighting and to the mass recruitment of volunteer rank-and-file soldiers, who are killed many times more often than their superiors. The deaths of 17 generals have been confirmed, among them five lieutenant generals. The most recent are Major General Valery Plokhotnyuk, chief of staff of the 49th Army, killed on August 1, 2026 by an explosion at a birthday party for General Alexander Chaiko, and Major General Anton Grunis, commander of the 4th Guards Motor Rifle Brigade, killed by a Ukrainian drone on September 12, 2026.

Ukraine’s General Staff publishes its own, much higher daily figures for total Russian losses. Mediazona published the full name list throughout 2025 on a separate website. The war is entering its fifth winter, with four years of military stalemate already complete and diplomacy still stalled. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this week that the war “is about Donbas”.