Journalists Publish Named List of 223,539 Russian Military Dead

Overview

• A joint project by BBC Russian service, Meduza and volunteer investigators published a named list of 223,539 Russian personnel who have died since the full-scale invasion, using obituaries, cemetery and memorial photos, and public registries.
• The dataset breaks those names into categories including 82,224 volunteers, 48,177 unidentified participants, 45,923 contract soldiers, 25,367 prisoners and 18,955 mobilized personnel.
• Military experts quoted by the BBC say open-source methods likely capture roughly 45 to 65 percent of total deaths so the true toll is probably higher than the named list indicates.
• Other recent estimates vary markedly with a registry-based analysis pointing to about 352,000 Russian citizen deaths through the end of 2025, British intelligence putting losses near 500,000, and the Ukrainian General Staff reporting about 1,361,070 combat losses.
• The counts diverge because of different timeframes, who is counted (Russian citizens versus foreign fighters), deliberate underreporting inside Russia, and methodological exclusions such as DPR/LPR fighters before 2023 and North Korean personnel, a gap that affects compensation, regional politics and international assessments.