In the second 12 months on the front line the body count was nearly 25% higher than in the first year.

Russia’s military death toll in Ukraine has now passed the 50,000 mark - the BBC can confirm.

In the second 12 months on the front line - as Moscow pushed its so-called meat grinder strategy - we found the body count was nearly 25% higher than in the first year.

BBC Russian, independent media group Mediazona and volunteers have been counting deaths since February 2022.

New graves in cemeteries helped provide the names of many soldiers.

Our teams also combed through open-source information from official reports, newspapers and social media.

More than 27,300 Russian soldiers died in the second year of combat - according to our findings - a reflection of how territorial gains have come at a huge human cost.

Russia has declined to comment.

  • RubberDuck
    English
    12•8 months ago

    Well it also depends on what you count as Russian casualties. In the language Russians differentiate between Russky (white ethnic Russians) and Rossiyane (the rest)

    • DPR and LPR don’t count as they are mostly Rossiyane.
    • Ethnic minority Russians that are voluntold are Rossiyane
    • Prison voluntold are also out of scope.
    • Foreign “volunteers” are not not even Russian (so who cares, right?).

    Especially the DPR and LPR with their under equipped units vore the brunt of the early war, followed by penal battalions like storm Z units.

    The end result will be a highly sanitized casualty number for the actual Russian military. The current state is that the Russians manage to recruit as much as they lose, so the numbers stay the same.

    However in the early days of the war the Russians needed bodies on the line. In the Russian military a lot of units consist of a core of professionals that keep the unit standing and the unit is supplemented with constripts in time of war. The professionals of the units are then tasked with training the conscripts.

    But to get bodies on the line, a lot of these units where hollowed out by sending more of their professionals to the front, severely crippling the units ability to regenerate.

    So some important questions seem to be:

    • Can the Russian military keep up their recruitment numbers (foreign sources of Manpower will dry up as the war progresses and more people know about the fate that awaits volunteers)
    • Can the Russian military keep up the reconstitution of their units in any meaningful way
    • What is the effect of these losses in the medium term?
    • what are the geopolitical consequences if it turns out that the Russian military cannot keep this up (Collapse of the CSTO, border conflicts, loss of other foreign assets and control).

    It is an interesting time for Russia and the most interesting period seems to be ahead for them.