WARSAW: Independent Russian media outlet Mediazona said on Saturday according to its estimates more than 66,000 Russian military personnel have died during the war in Ukraine.

Mediazona has been drawing up a list of known soldier deaths in conjunction with the BBC Russian Service using open-source data. Previously in April, they announced they had found more than 50,000 names of Russians killed.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in June that almost 700,0000 Russian soldiers were fighting in Ukraine. Moscow rarely talks about the losses it has sustained in what it calls a “special military operation”.

The media outlet said that “as of Aug 30, we know the names of 66,471 Russian soldiers killed in the war”. The list has gone up by more than 4,600 in the last four weeks, it said, while stressing this was not a definitive figure since many soldiers’ deaths are not made public.

Moscow says five killed, 46 injured in strike by Kyiv

Anastasia Alekseyeva, a journalist at Mediazona, stressed that the latest death numbers were “not linked to Ukraine’s offensive in the Kursk region or Russia’s advance in the east”. This is because researchers are still working through a backlog of death reports, she said.

The report found that 172 conscripts doing national service have been killed in the war, with the highest figures in early months. However these figures may be inexact since conscripts can sign professional army contracts and some may have done so without telling relatives, Mediazona editor Dmitry Treshchanin said.

According to the breakdown, the region with the largest absolute number of deaths — 2,578 — is the southern republic of Bashkortostan, which has a large Muslim population.

The most represented age group overall was 33-35 (6,877 deaths). More than 12,000 of the dead were prisoners, after Russia sought to recruit inmates by promising them freedom after a period on the front line. But numbers have dropped recently, Alekseyeva said: “evidently the recruitment drive is not as active”.

The defence ministry in September 2022 said 5,937 soldiers had been killed in combat. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in February that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in the first two years of the war.

Kyiv strike

Five people were killed and 46 injured in a Ukrainian attack on the southwestern Russian city of Belgorod late on Friday, the local governor said, the latest in a series of strikes by Ukraine on the city in recent months.

Vyacheslav Gladkov said 37 of the injured, including seven children, were taken to hospitals in the city, which lies 40 km north of the border with Ukraine.

Video filmed from inside a vehicle, posted on social media and purporting to show the attack, showed a car being blown up while moving along a road. Seconds later another explosion is seen metres away. Russia’s Foreign Ministry condemned the attack.

“Once again we call on all responsible governments and relevant international structures to strongly condemn this brutal terrorist attack and publicly distance themselves from the Kyiv regime and its Western curators who commit such crimes,” it said on Saturday.

The ministry added that Russia’s “special military operation” will continue until it reaches all the goals including Ukraine’s “demilitarisation and de-nazification”.

Ukrainian air defences shot down 24 out of 52 drones launched by Russia during overnight attacks on eight regions across Ukraine, the air force said on Saturday.

It said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app that 25 Shahed drones had fallen on their own and three others had flown towards Russia and Belarus. There were no reports of anybody being hurt in the attacks or of any major damage being caused.

Ukraine uses electronic warfare as well as mobile hunting groups and aircraft defences to repel frequent Russian drone and missile strikes. Air alerts sounded several times during the overnight drone attacks, with many people rushing to shelters in the middle of the night.

Published in Dawn, September 1st, 2024