Western analysts say Russia is losing 50,000 soldiers a month. A Meduza investigation suggests those estimates are based on manipulated data.
Meduza • • world
Key Points:
- Ukraine aims to wear down Russian forces through attrition, with President Zelensky targeting 50,000 Russian soldier deaths per month to pressure the Kremlin into ending the war.
- Meduza's investigation reveals that recent data suggesting a sharp rise in Russian casualties is misleading, largely due to a backlog in reporting and changes in how missing soldiers are officially declared dead.
- Since May 2023, a new Russian legal process has allowed missing soldiers to be declared dead by court order without recovered bodies, causing a surge in retroactive death registrations that inflate 2025 casualty figures.
- Correcting for this reclassification and improved data collection, actual Russian battlefield deaths are estimated at about 600 per day (around 27,000 per month), less than
