Russian soldiers deployed nea the town of Lyman in eastern Ukraine, November 2023. Photo: Stanislav Krasilnikov / Sputnik / Imago Images / Scanpix / LETA

An investigation published on Monday by Russian independent media outlets Meduza and Mediazona has put the estimated number of Russian soldiers killed since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine at over 160,000.

The latest estimate, which was released to coincide with the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, is more than double the 75,000 figure provided by Meduza and Mediazona after two years of war last year.

The researchers, who compared lists of dead Russian soldiers with data available from Russia’s registry of inheritance cases to produce a statistical estimate of Russian losses, noted that the death toll had risen sharply with each year analysed, so that while some 20,000 Russian soldiers were estimated to have died in 2022, the same estimate for 2024 neared 100,000.

Mediazona also published all the available information it had on the 95,323 dead Russian soldiers it has identified to date in an ongoing open-source intelligence project it has undertaken alongside BBC News Russian.

Experts interviewed by the BBC in January stressed that the real death toll was likely to be far higher than the confirmed figures, as only between 45–65% of all Russian deaths in Ukraine had been accounted for by researchers, who are forced to rely on open-source intelligence data provided by social media posts, obituaries published in the Russian press and the placing of new gravestones in cemeteries across Russia to make their calculations.

Official data on Russian casualties has remained incredibly scarce throughout the three years of war, with the last official Russian death toll of 5,937 announced by former Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu in September 2022.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky disclosed in December that approximately 43,000 Ukrainian military personnel had been killed since the start of the full-scale invasion, adding that he believed Russian losses were much higher, putting them at 198,000 troops killed and over 550,000 wounded.