Journalists and Volunteers Join Efforts to Count Russian War Dead

The Russian soldier was named Dmitri Tsvigun. A table tennis coach in a small town in Siberia, he volunteered to fight in Ukraine at the age of 30. But he died of shrapnel wounds when a tank exploded near him in Ukraine’s eastern province of Donetsk on Nov. 20.

“He responded to his heart’s call to join the special military operation,” said a short memorial article in a local newspaper on Dec. 8.

That brief report added Tsvigun to a list of confirmed Russian war kills, a list that is maintained by a small, dedicated team of journalists and volunteers, as the Kremlin avoids publicly updating the number. Organized by the independent Russian news agency Mediazona, with the BBC’s Russian service and about a dozen anonymous volunteers in Russia, the list draws information from sources such as newspaper articles, photographs on tombstones, other soldiers mourning their comrades and even tips from relatives who want their loved ones included in the count.

The list surpassed 10,000 names, including more than 400 Russians recently called up.

“If the government doesn’t account for Russian casualties, someone has to,” said David Frenkel, one of four Mediazona data reporters who run the project. “It is important for us to explain to the Russians the cost of war,” he added. “If they don’t understand the cost of photos of devastated Ukrainian cities, maybe the number of dead Russians will give them second thoughts.”

The Russian government has exactly tried to avoid this, barely mentioning the death toll in the war it started by invading Ukraine on February 24th. He updated the number exactly twice: once in late March and again in September, when Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said 5,937 Russian soldiers had died since the start of the war.

That official number is notably lower than estimates by Western military and intelligence officials. General Mark A. Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example, said in November that Moscow’s casualties were “well over 100,000 Russian soldiers killed and wounded.”

There were similar estimates of Ukrainian losses. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymir Zelensky, told a Ukrainian news channel this month that up to 13,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died in the conflict.

With so much fog of war enveloping the matter, Mediazona decided that online investigation was necessary to establish a baseline of Russian deaths. A scattered group of volunteers in Russia was already trying to document the deaths on their own, and the Russian BBC News service had done several articles on the subject; so they joined forces.

They did not set out to document all the deaths, and estimated that their Russian tally was one-third to one-half of the true total. But by collecting as much information as was available from social media posts and giving each death listed a name, they realized that their number was better than a mere estimate.

“It’s not just about the number; it’s about who died or how they died,” said Maxim Litavrin, another Mediazona journalist.

Ukrainians send a confusing stream of information about Russians killed in the war on various channels on the Telegram app, including the names of the deceased. The team of volunteer investigators in Russia then searches for names on social media.

All open source information ends up in a huge spreadsheet. Journalists work quickly to check links and back everything up because personal posts often go missing. They compare the names with a government website that lists deceased people across Russia but does not specify military deaths.

Seven out of 10 confirmations come from local reports, the journalists said, while the others are a mixed bag. They include advertisements for local authorities or businesses; individual posts on VKontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook; and sources such as photos of memorial plaques placed in former schools for dead soldiers.

Every two weeks, Mediazona analyzes all the numbers to break down the number on its website, including deaths by region, military unit and age.

Results can vary dramatically by region. In Dagestan, Russia, for example, where serving and dying in the Russian army is considered an honor, authorities tend to make statements about the dead.

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

“Cemeteries give us a lot of data,” Frenkel said.

Military analysts have mixed opinions about the project. Some prefer to work with estimates of the total death toll rather than a slice of the total. Others emphasized that the work was especially helpful in identifying patterns.

“The project is a useful snapshot of broader gaps and patterns in Russian losses,” said Karolina Hird, a Russia analyst at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War. “We know that Russian authorities are simply not reporting truthfully on losses.”

Mediazona reporters noted that resistance to the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya has risen along with the death toll, but there is little sign of this in Russia.

Spending every day scrolling through information about dead people is mentally draining, they said, but certain posts linger in the memory. Litavrin remembers reading about a 40-year-old man who had a quiet, regular life and a daughter, and who volunteered in August. He was killed after two weeks on the battlefield.

“I wondered what he was thinking,” Litavrin said. “It’s terrible.”