Moscow, Jul. 10, (dpa/GNA) - At least 47,000 Russian soldiers have been killed so far in Moscow’s full-scale war against Ukraine that started in February 2022, according to calculations by independent Russian media.
This was the result of a data analysis based on the number of opened inheritance cases and the statistics of excess mortality in the past year, the internet portal Meduza, which was involved in the evaluation, reported on Monday.
The number of losses does not include missing and seriously injured people. Nor does it include fighters who fell in the ranks of the separatist militias of the self-styled Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic – or those who did not possess a Russian passport.
Based on the increased number of probate proceedings opened in Russia for men, according to the data analysis, it can be estimated that about 22,000 soldiers had fallen by the end of 2022 and another 25,000 soldiers from the beginning of 2023 until the end of May.
The figure for excess male mortality published by the statistics agency Rosstat confirms this thesis, at least for 2022. According to this figure, as many as 24,000 to 25,000 Russians had fallen by the end of last year.
Figures for 2023 will not be available until June 2024.
Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
Officially, there are no statistics on the number of Russian casualties. The last time the Ministry of Defence in Moscow gave figures was at the end of September 2022, when it admitted that 5,937 of its own soldiers had died. Even then, the figures were considered to be grossly understated.
On the other side, the figures of the Ukrainian military, which currently speak of more than 230,000 Russian dead, are considered an exaggeration.
There is also no evidence for the figures from Western intelligence services, which speak of more than 100,000 Russian war dead.
The figures now published by Meduza and other media are based on statistics and also on a comparison with published obituaries.
The figure of 47,000 deaths mentioned corresponds to more than three times the number of Soviet casualties in the 1979-89 Afghan war and nine times the number of war dead on the Russian side in the first Chechen war of 1994-96.
GNA