Russian losses in the war with Ukraine.
Mediazona count, updated

Since the beginning of 2026, we have been able to confirm more than 77,000 deaths among Russian military personnel. Deaths that occurred in 2026, however, account for no more than 10% of that figure: the rest died between 2022 and 2025.

Does this mean the Russian army is losing fewer men in 2026? No, that is not the case. But how can we explain the lack of data? There are several reasons.

The main one is the duration of the war itself. We still do not have a complete picture even of 2022. To show how slowly the data reaches us, we have updated our infographic, Confirmed Russian losses in Ukraine per week.

Take the week of November 28–December 4, 2024, as an example. It stands out clearly on the chart: the death toll over those days was abnormally high (we currently know of 2,766 deaths). In 2024 we confirmed around 400 of them; we added a further 1,526 in 2025 and 845 in 2026. Clearly, the picture is still incomplete.

Why is this happening?

In 2022 and 2023 the front line moved fairly quickly, artillery was the primary means of inflicting casualties, and the concept of a “grey zone” was barely used. At that time, most obituaries were published with a standard delay ranging from a few days to a month. Another metric we used as a reference was the difference between the date of death and its registration at the civil registry office; in that period it rarely exceeded eight days.

At the end of 2023, the war changed. With the start of the battle for Avdiivka, the Russian army’s losses rose sharply, and those killed were—and still are—mostly volunteers: men who signed army contracts after the war began. They are assigned to “Storm” units or rifle companies, close equivalents of the Wagner Group’s “assault units”. But whereas the families of Wagner’s recruited prisoners learned of a death after roughly a month, in the regular armed forces the wait stretches into years.

With the emergence and widespread use of FPV drones, analysts increasingly speak of a “grey zone” or “kill zone”: a neutral strip controlled by neither side, where any movement is lethal. This “grey zone” is widening and now extends for tens of kilometers. Recovering bodies from it is either severely hampered or entirely impossible.

In 2025, the Russian army supplemented its “human wave” tactics with “infiltration” tactics using small groups. This does not reduce losses, but the bodies of men killed while infiltrating cannot be recovered until the Russian army takes firm control of the ground and the front moves 12 to 20 kilometres beyond it.

And whereas in 2024 and 2025 the front was still moving in Russia’s favor by several kilometers a month, by 2026 this advance has slowed to a minimum.

All of this combined means that medical teams are simply unable to recover the bodies of those killed, even from last year’s battles. Until there is a body—or a court ruling declaring a missing man dead—there is no death certificate, and therefore no obituary.

There are two more reasons for the delay in the data that are worth mentioning—they are internal to our system. The more obituaries we have, the more records need clarifying and updating, and the longer it takes to check each one for uniqueness so as to avoid duplicates. In normal working conditions we add 5,000 to 6,000 unique records a month. But even those do not appear on the weekly chart straight away: that requires a date of death, which in many cases we establish later still.

To “catch up” with the front lines and at least somewhat narrow the gap with reality, we cross-check leaked unit rosters, MIA appeals and other sources. That is how we confirmed more than 20,000 deaths in February this year, on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the invasion.

What we know about losses

The map below shows the distribution of casualties across Russia’s regions. These are absolute figures and have not been adjusted for population or number of military units.

You can filter the map to show total losses, losses by branch of service, or the home regions of mobilised soldiers who were killed.

In most cases, official reports or visual cues like uniforms and insignia allow us to determine a soldier’s branch of service, or how he came to be in the army (mobilised, volunteer, prisoner, etc.).

The chart below compares these different groups of servicemen.

From early summer and into the mid-fall season of 2022, volunteers bore the brunt of the losses, which is strikingly different from the situation in the initial stage of the war: in winter and early spring, the Airborne Forces suffered the greatest damage, followed by the Motorised Rifle troops.

By the end of 2022 and the beginning of the next year, losses among prisoners recruited into the Wagner PMC increased markedly. They were formed into “assault groups” to overwhelm Ukrainian positions near Bakhmut.

By March 2023, prisoners became the largest category of war losses. After the capture of Bakhmut, there have been no cases of mass use of prisoners so far.

By September 2024, volunteers once again emerged as the largest category among the KIA. This shift reflects a cumulative effect: prison recruitment had significantly waned, no new mobilisation had been announced, yet the stream of volunteers continued unabated.

By August 14, 2026, the death of 7,533 officers of the Russian army and other security agencies had been confirmed.

The proportion of officer deaths among overall casualties has steadily declined since the conflict began. In the early stages, when professional contract soldiers formed the main invasion force, officers accounted for up to 10% of fatalities. By November 2024, this figure had dropped to between 2–3%—a shift that reflects both evolving combat tactics and the intensive recruitment of volunteer infantry, who suffer casualty rates many times higher than their commanding officers.

Officers killed in Ukraine

To date, the deaths of 15 Russian generals have been officially confirmed: five Lieutenant Generals, seven Major Generals, two who had retired from active service, and one Ukrainian SBU general who had fled to Russia.

Lieutenant General Oleg Tsokov, deputy commander of the Southern Military District, was killed in July 2023—the first officer of that rank to die in the war. In December 2024, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, head of the Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical (NBC) Protection Troops, was killed by a bomb in Moscow. Lieutenant General Yaroslav Moskalik, a senior officer in the General Staff’s Main Operational Directorate, was killed by a car bomb in a Moscow suburb in April 2025. In December 2025, Lieutenant General Fanil Sarvarov, head of the Operational Training Directorate of the Russian General Staff, was killed in Moscow by a car bomb. On March 31, 2026, Lieutenant General Alexander Otroschenko, commander of the mixed aviation corps of the Northern Fleet, was killed in the crash of an An-26 transport aircraft in Crimea.

Two deputy army commanders, Major General Andrei Sukhovetsky (41st Army) and Major General Vladimir Frolov (8th Army), were killed in the first weeks of the war. In June 2022, Major General Roman Kutuzov was killed in an attack on a troop formation.

Major General Sergei Goryachev, chief of staff of the 35th Combined Arms Army, was killed in June 2023 while commanding forces against the Ukrainian counter-offensive in the Zaporizhzhia region. In November 2023, Major General Vladimir Zavadsky, deputy commander of the 14th Army Corps, was killed near the village of Krynky.

In November 2024, Major General Pavel Klimenko, commander of the 5th Separate Motorised Rifle Brigade (formerly the “Oplot” Brigade of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic), was fatally wounded by an FPV drone.

In July 2025, a strike on the headquarters of the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade killed at least six officers, including the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy, Mikhail Gudkov.

The two retired generals on the list are Kanamat Botashev, a pilot who had been dismissed for crashing a fighter jet and was fighting for Wagner PMC when his Su-25 was shot down in May 2022, and Andrei Golovatsky, a former Interior Ministry general serving an 8.5-year prison sentence (but maintained his rank) who was killed in June 2024.

On March 17, 2026, SBU Major General Volodymyr Lyapkin was killed in the Kherson region. Until February 2014, Lyapkin headed a department in the Ukrainian special services, but after the victory of the Maidan revolution, he fled to Russia. After the war began, he served in the occupation administration of Kherson and then transferred to the “Bars-33” unit.

The date of death is known in 221,500 cases. While this data does not capture the full daily reality of the war, it does suggest which periods saw the most intense fighting.

Please note that data for the most recent months is most incomplete and will change significantly in the future.

The age of the deceased is mentioned in 225,000 reports. For the first six months of the war, when the fighting was done by the regular army, the 21-23 age group accounted for the most deaths.

Volunteers and mobilised men are significantly older: people voluntarily go to war over 30, and the mobilised are generally over 25.