Mediazona, working with the BBC Russian service and a team of volunteers, has now confirmed by name 239,354 Russian military personnel killed between February 24, 2022 and August 13, 2026. The list is built only from publicly verifiable material — obituaries, relatives' social-media posts, local media, and statements by regional authorities — and its compilers stress it is not exhaustive, because not every death is publicly reported. Among those identified are 87,749 volunteers who signed contracts after the invasion began, 26,416 recruited prisoners, 19,778 mobilised men and 7,533 officers; volunteers have been the largest single category of the dead since September 2024, and the officer share of fatalities has fallen from around 10% early in the war to between 2% and 3%. A date of death is known in 221,500 cases, about 93% of the total.
The more consequential finding is how far the count now lags the fighting. Of more than 77,000 deaths confirmed since the start of 2026, no more than a tenth occurred in 2026; the rest died between 2022 and 2025. Mediazona attributes the widening delay to the shape of the current war rather than to any slowdown in losses: the drone-controlled "grey zone" between the armies now runs for tens of kilometres and bodies frequently cannot be recovered from it, small-group infiltration tactics leave the dead where they fall until the front moves twelve to twenty kilometres beyond them, and in 2026 the front has barely moved at all. Without a body or a court ruling declaring a missing man dead there is no death certificate, and therefore no obituary to find. The team adds 5,000 to 6,000 unique records a month in normal conditions, and has taken to cross-checking leaked unit rosters and missing-persons appeals to close the gap. Separately, it maintains an excess-mortality estimate built with Meduza from the national Probate Registry, last updated on May 9, 2026 and covering deaths only to late December 2025.
The figure is therefore a floor on Russian deaths, not a measure of them, and by construction it is least complete for the months that matter most to the question of whether Russia can replace its losses. Claimed totals are far higher and are not comparable: Ukraine's General Staff put cumulative Russian personnel losses at about 1,467,320 as of August 17 without separating the killed from the wounded, missing and captured, and on July 31 Volodymyr Zelensky put Russian casualties at roughly 1.6 million including some 700,000 killed.