352,000 Russian soldiers killed — new estimate of losses over four years of full-scale war

AP Photo Alexei Alexandrov

The total number of Russian servicemen killed from the beginning of the major war until the end of 2025 is 352,000 people. This estimate — for the first time in all previous waves of the joint study by "Meduza" and "Mediazona" — includes those who were declared killed or missing by a court, meaning in the absence of a body.

As before, losses on the Russian side among citizens of other states are not estimated. The estimate is statistical, meaning it has a prognostic interval. When a specific figure is indicated, it refers to the central, most probable values.

Approximately another 90,000 are those who were declared killed or missing by a court.

In both cases, we are talking about people who died during hostilities (and did not become prisoners of war or flee the battlefield). The only difference between them is the mechanism by which death was officially registered.

One can speak about "regular" and "judicially declared" killed with varying degrees of accuracy. More is known about the first category; it lends itself better to analysis. The social composition of the second group is less known. And most importantly, there is currently no data on the number of missing persons for the last six months of the estimated period (July-December 2025).

To estimate the number of missing persons declared killed by a court, two different methods were used: one based on the analysis of inheritance cases, the other on the analysis of lawsuits for declaring a person killed or missing.

Both approaches yielded similar results: the most probable number of such losses by mid-2025 is about 90,000 people. According to the most conservative estimate, there cannot be fewer than 52,000, but this is clearly incomplete statistics.

The authors of the study did not attempt to predict the number of missing persons for the second half of 2025 — nothing is known about these people yet.

Since the ratio between the killed and missing has changed repeatedly during the war, the authors do not consider it possible to predict this based on historical data.

To analyze the dynamics of what is happening on the battlefield, it is worth considering precisely the number of killed, not the total estimate: its method is stable over time and allows comparing different periods of the war.

Among those killed in the war, there may be some who are still officially considered alive; neither relatives nor military units may have yet applied for them to be declared deceased.

Since only documents are used in the calculations, the authors do not build hypotheses about the number of such a category of people. Given the motivation of both relatives and military units, the researchers do not believe that the number of such people, if they did not die in the last one or two years, is significant.

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