The First-Ever Scientific Estimate of Russia’s Dead & MIA Soldiers in Ukraine

14 May 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

This estimate of killed and Missing-In-Action Russian soldiers in Ukraine was done by two anti-Putin (pro-U.S.-empire) Russian-language independent news-media, Meduza in Riga Latvia, and Mediazona in Vilnius Lithuania, with unidentified assistance from the BBC’s Russian Service, which is also headquartered in Riga (but which had started in London on 24 March 1946, to propagandize Russians to overthrow their then-Soviet Government). This article from Meduza estimating Russian soldiers dead and MIA during 24 February 2022 to the middle of 2025, was published full-length only on Meduza and abbreviated on Mediazona, both showing a total of 352,000 Russian military dead and MIA during 24 February 2022 to mid-2025 (though the BBC’s Russia Service published it also on May 9th in a heavily sanitized version to discredit Meduza’s far more detailed and credible version, and came up with a total that was “Based on these estimates, the real death toll among Russians could be between 332,600 and 480,500 people.”); so, the extent to which the other two news-media (Mediazona and BBC) had actually participated in the article’s research may reasonably be questioned. However, the methodology of Meduza’s estimate is far more comprehensive and rigorous than any that has previously been published; so, their figure (352,000 Russian soldiers gone) may reasonably be taken as the definitive one throughout that period of time. (The reason why it’s not up to a more recent time is that it takes up to a year for some of the most crucial data to become finalized and published, from which the estimates in Meduza’s article were calculated.)

I should also note that on 30 January 2025, I had headlined “A Possible Turnabout in the Ukraine War”, and documented that since November 2024, Ukraine had very effectively, with American help, been building and using drones to bomb deep into Russia and had already decommissioned there around 11% of Russia’s total annual oil-refinery and storage capacity, and that this first-ever successful Ukrainian offensive military operation in the war might turnabout the war’s future direction. It has, indeed, done so, and therefore now Russia’s advantage is no longer so large as it had previously been. Consequently, unless Russia can now nullify those drones, Russia’s casualties might now already be at a significantly higher rate than was the case before mid-2025.

The Meduza article headlined “350 тысяч погибших российских солдат Это новая — надежная — оценка потерь ВС РФ за четыре года большой войны. Нам впервые удалось включить в подсчет пропавших без вести военных” or “350,000 Russian soldiers killed. This is a new, reliable estimate of the Russian Armed Forces’ losses over the four years of the Great War. For the first time, we were able to include missing soldiers in the count.” It said:

Before we move on to explaining the assessment, let us formulate the main findings of the new study.

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The total number of Russian military personnel killed from the beginning of the Great War until the end of 2025 is 352 thousand people. This estimate — for the first time in all waves of our joint study with Mediazona — includes those declared dead or missing by court order — that is, without a body. As before, we do not estimate the number of casualties on the Russian side among citizens of other countries. Our estimate is statistical, meaning it has a predictive interval. By providing a specific number, we are referring to the central, most probable values.

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261,000 are the “regular” fatalities; their number is calculated in the same way as our previous estimates. Another approximately 90 thousand – those who were declared dead or missing by the courtIn both cases, we’re talking about people who died during combat (rather than being captured or fleeing the battlefield). The only difference is the mechanism by which the death was officially recorded.

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We can speak with varying degrees of precision about “ordinary” and “judicial” victims. More is known about the former; this category lends itself better to analysis. We know less about the social composition of the latter group. And most importantly — We don’t yet know the number of missing people in the last six months.assessment period (July-December 2025).

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To estimate the number of missing persons declared dead by the courts, we used two different methods: one based on an analysis of probate cases, the other on an analysis of lawsuits for recognition of dead or missing persons. Both approaches yielded similar results: the most likely number of such losses by mid-2025 is approximately 90,000 people.According to the most conservative estimate, there cannot be less than 52 thousand of them., but this is clearly an incomplete statistic.

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We 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 of the dead to the missing fluctuated repeatedly during the war, we do not believe it is possible to predict this number based on historical data.

•

Among the many data-series that had never before been factored into calculations of Russia’s soldier-deaths were the ratio of male deaths to female deaths in the general  Russian population during that time-period (24 February 2022 to mid 2025), which death-rate, during this war, escalated significantly above the prior period. This was meaningful because virtually 100% of the soldiers were men; so, the war would explain why ONLY male death-rates had increased markedly since 24 February 2022.

There are many other ways in which this estimate by Meduza is by far the most credible count of how many Russian soldiers have died in this war. To see the complete article, just click onto the translated version of Medusa’s article.

The CIA-edited and written Wikipedia (which blacklists — blocks from linking to — sites that aren’t CIA-approved) article “Casualties of the Russo-Ukrainian War” links at its footnotes 100 and 101 to the BBC’s and Mediazona’s articles but not to the more authoritative Meduza one, and presents this information right after showing estimates from Ukraine’s government and from the UK’s government and from America’s CSIS and from the Economist, of around 1.2 million Russian soldiers having been killed during that same period.

The credible estimates of the Ukrainian military’s deaths in this same period range between 1 million to 1.7 million; so, the ratio of Ukrainian soldiers killed to Russian soldiers killed is probably around 3-to-1 to 5-to-1. Clearly, the U.S. empire is drowning in its propaganda and is anything but a democracy or representing any — it is government-by-deceit.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.