Russia’s war dead count, with escapes, cuts, and a gigantic excel

The Russian soldier’s name was Dmitri Tsvigun.

A ping pong coach in a small Siberian town, he had volunteered to fight in the Ukraine.

But at the age of 30 he died of shrapnel wounds when a tank exploded near him in the Ukrainian province of Donetskin the east of the country, on 20 November.

“he replied to call of your heart to join the special military operation,” read a short commemorative article published in a local newspaper on December 8.

Thanks to that brief account, Tsvigun became one of the lists of confirmed Russian casualties maintained by a small, dedicated team of journalists and data volunteers, as the Kremlin has largely avoided publicly updating the figure.

Directed by midfielderan independent Russian media outlet, with the BBC’s Russian Service and a dozen anonymous volunteers in Russia, the list draws information from sources such as newspaper articles, photographs of gravestones, fellow soldiers mourning their comrades, and even tips from family members who they want to include their loved ones in the count.

The list has been exceeded 10,000 namesincluding more than 400 newly recruited Russians.

“If the Russian government doesn’t count the Russian victims, someone has to,” says David Frenkel, one of the four Mediazona data reporters leading the project.

“It is important that we explain the cost of the war to the Russians,” he added.

“If you don’t understand the cost of images of devastated Ukrainian cities, perhaps the number of Russian dead will convince you reflect“.

The Russian government has tried to avoid just that by hinting at the death toll from the war that began with the February 24 invasion of Ukraine.

You updated the figure exactly twice:

one in late March and another in September, when Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said 5,937 Russian soldiers had been killed since the start of the war.

That official figure is significantly lower than estimates by Western military and intelligence services.

General Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example, said in November that Moscow’s casualties were “well over 100,000 troops dead and wounded Russians”.

Mykhailo Podolyak, senior adviser to the president Volodymyr Zelensky, he told a Ukrainian news channel this month that too 13,000 soldiers Ukrainians had been killed in the conflict.

With so much fog of war enveloping the matter, Mediazona decided online research was needed to establish a baseline of Russian deaths.

A scattered group of volunteers in Russia were already trying to document the deaths on their own, and the BBC’s Russian news service had published several articles on the matter, so they joined forces.

They did not set out to document all of the deaths and calculated the Russian count to be roughly between one third and one half of the actual total.

But by gathering all the information available on social media and naming each deceased, they calculated their figure was better than an estimate.

“It’s not just about the number, but about who died or how they died,” says Maxim Litavrin, another Mediazona reporter.

Ukrainians upload a messy stream of information about Russian war dead, including the names of those killed, to various channels on the Telegram messaging app.

Next, the team of volunteer researchers from Russia look up the names in the file social media.

All information from open sources ends up in one huge spreadsheet.

Journalists work quickly to check links and back everything up, because personal messages often disappear.

They check names on a government website that lists deaths across Russia, but doesn’t specify military deaths.

Seven out of ten confirmations come from local news, data journalists explain, while the rest is a mixed bag.

These are announcements from local officials or employers, individual posts on VKontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook, and sources such as photographs of memorial plaques placed in the former schools of deceased soldiers.

Every two weeks, Mediazona breaks down all the figures on its website, including deaths by region, military unit and age.

Results can vary drastically by region.

In Dagestan, Russia, for example, where serving and dying in the Russian military is considered an honor, officers often issue statements about the deceased.

In some regions such as Krasnodar, volunteers have counted hundreds of war dead by visiting cemeteries. Even temporary gravestones in Russian cemeteries often include a photo of the deceased, along with their name, military unit, date of birth, and date of death.

“The cemeteries they give us a lot,” says Frenkel.

Military analysts have mixed opinions on the project.

Some prefer to work with estimates of the total death toll rather than a fraction of the total.

Others point out that the work was particularly helpful in identifying patterns.

“The project is a useful snapshot of broader breakdowns and patterns in Russian losses,” said Karolina Hird, a Russia analyst at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.

“We know that the Russian authorities simply don’t report accurate losses.”

An early guideline, for example, showed that around 20 percent of Russia’s war dead were officers.

“This told us a lot about how the Russian military operates,” said Olga Ivshina, a reporter for the BBC’s Russian Service who alternates with Mediazona every week to tally up the numbers.

It turned out that senior Russian officers were initially deployed close to the front line because junior officers could not give orders.

The information available on the Internet varies greatly.

A local community page posted photos of Alexander A. Dementov, 28, and Alexander Trokhov, 38, after they were recruited in late September. Both worked at the Nadezhdinski Metallurgical Plant in Serov, a Russian city in the Urals.

On 7 December, a local newspaper reported that both men, who had served in the 55th Motor Rifle Brigade, had been killed in a rocket attack on 23 November.

Sometimes the details are scarce.

Vsevolod Matveev was number 10,000 on the spreadsheet.

Data reporters found out that he was from the Sverdlovsk region of the Urals and was buried on December 9 in the town of Zarechny.

His photograph showed that he had served in a motorized infantry unit.

But that was it.

When public sources cannot confirm the deaths, names are placed on a sidelist pending further details.

The Mediazona journalists underlined that the resistance to the wars of Afghanistan and Chechnya it has developed in tandem with the death toll, but there has been little sign of it in Russia.

Spending every day looking for information about dead people is mentally exhausting, they said, but some messages stay with them.

Litavrin recalls reading about a 40-year-old man who had a quiet, normal life and a daughter, who volunteered in August.

He died after two weeks on the battlefield.

“I was wondering what he was thinking,” Litavrin said.

“It’s terrible”.

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