Independent Russian media outlet Mediazona said on Saturday that it estimated more than 66,000 Russian military personnel had been killed during the war in Ukraine.
MediaZona, together with the BBC Russian Service, is compiling a list of known military deaths using open source data.
Earlier in April they announced they had received the names of more than 50,000 Russian citizens killed.
Mediazona said on Saturday that “as of August 30, we know the names of 66,471 Russian soldiers killed in the war”.
It said the list had grown by more than 4,600 in the past four weeks, although it stressed this was not a definitive figure as many deaths are not made public.
Mediazona journalist Anastasia Alekseyeva stressed that the latest death toll “is not connected to Ukraine’s invasion of the Kursk region or Russia’s advance in the east”.
He said that’s because researchers are still working through pending death reports.
The report found that 172 soldiers serving in national service were killed in the war, with the highest number occurring in the early months.
However, these figures may not be accurate, as conscripts may sign professional military contracts and some may have done so without informing their relatives, said Dmitry Treshchanin, editor of Mediazona.
According to Mediazona, the region with the most deaths (2,578) is the southern republic of Bashkortostan, which has a large Muslim population.
Overall, the most represented age group was 33–35 (6,877 deaths).
Among the dead were more than 12,000 prisoners, whom Russia had sought to recruit by promising them freedom after they had served a period of time on the front lines.
But numbers have declined recently, Alekseyeva said: “Apparently the recruitment campaign is not as active.”
Mediazona and the BBC together with volunteers have been counting deaths since February 2022, using official reports and open source information from the media, as well as satellite images of Russian cemeteries to estimate the number of new graves.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said in June that about 700,000 Russian troops were fighting in Ukraine.
Moscow rarely talks about the losses it has suffered in “special military operations.”
The Defence Ministry said in September 2022 that 5,937 soldiers had been killed in the war.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in February that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in the first two years of the war.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
