Western analysts say Russia is dropping 50,000 troopers a month. A Meduza investigation suggests these estimates are based mostly on manipulated information.

Given the battlefield stalemate in Ukraine, Kyiv’s greatest remaining hope is attrition — inflicting losses on the Russian military heavy sufficient to persuade the Kremlin that persevering with the conflict is pointless. In current weeks, Ukrainian politicians and navy commanders have been express about this purpose. President Zelensky has even put a quantity on it: 50,000 Russian soldiers killed per month. At first look, the info appear to counsel that Ukraine is closing in on that focus on: obituary databases and different open sources present Russian casualties rising sharply by 2025, and lots of Western analysts have accepted these casualty counts at face worth. A new investigation by Meduza reveals that these estimates are nearly definitely unsuitable.

Final yr’s spike in recorded Russian casualties probably displays a bookkeeping lag, not a turning level on the battlefield.

For 4 years, casualty estimates have diverse wildly, and a persistent methodological drawback has made them practically inconceivable to consider. Most revealed casualty figures are inflated by the inclusion of wounded troopers, nearly all of whom return to obligation. What issues for assessing an military’s precise fight capability is irreversible losses: the killed, the lacking presumed lifeless, and the small fraction of wounded who’re completely incapacitated.

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Researchers can measure one determine with affordable confidence: the official demise depend — troopers for whom demise certificates have been issued. By late summer time 2025, that determine stood at roughly 220,000 (excluding international nationals combating with Russian forces and people conscripted in occupied Ukrainian territory). The impartial outlet Mediazona’s crowdsourced database of named Russian conflict lifeless contained roughly 125,000 entries as of August 2025; researchers estimated that for each confirmed title, roughly 1.76 troopers had really died.

Western analysts continue to apply this multiplier to estimate Russia’s present losses.

The issue is that this multiplier is now badly distorted. Since late 2024, Russia’s open authorized databases have been inundated with a new class of entry: troopers beforehand listed as lacking in motion who’ve been declared lifeless by courtroom order, with out their our bodies ever being recovered. A regulation enabling this process took impact in Could 2023, however the mechanism solely started working at scale roughly 18 months later. The sample strongly suggests a coordinated Protection Ministry marketing campaign to strain unit commanders to file missing-persons petitions with civilian courts. The doubtless motive is bureaucratic: formally declaring lacking troopers lifeless permits the navy to shut open instances and entitles households to demise advantages they may not in any other case acquire.

By late 2025, roughly 90,000 such instances had been opened. After Mediazona first reported on the marketing campaign, courts started eradicating the filings from their public databases.

The inheritance registry — a notarial database that households sometimes entry inside six months of a soldier’s official demise — lays the distortion naked. The primary graph beneath tracks inheritance instances for males by the hole between the recorded date of demise and the date of official registration. It exhibits a sharp current surge in instances the place that hole is abnormally lengthy — the telltale sample of missing-persons instances retroactively reclassified as deaths.

The sample doesn’t seem in the ladies’s management group, confirming that the info mirror conflict deaths, not any broader administrative change in how Russian courts or notaries course of instances.

A third graph, monitoring the lads’s inheritance instances by the date the case was opened quite than the recorded date of demise, exhibits that the overwhelming majority of these delayed instances have been filed inside the previous yr or two — exactly when the Protection Ministry marketing campaign seems to have begun in earnest. Troopers who went lacking in 2022, 2023, and 2024 are actually being declared lifeless en masse, and their deaths are showing in the databases as 2025 casualties.

In the named-obituary databases, in the meantime, researchers have considerably improved their protection over the previous yr, that means the obvious bounce in 2025 entries displays higher information assortment as a lot as greater precise deaths.