Russia-Ukraine war: An independent research has claimed that almost 50,000 Russians have been killed in Ukraine since Moscow's invasion last year that continues to escalate its conflict with Kyiv. The analysis reportedly used Russian government data to bring Russian casualties to light.
As the Russian-Ukraine war completed 500 days, any possibility of de-escalation of conflict between Moscow and Kyiv remain slim. Russia has ususally refrained from declaring its military casualties in the war and any attempts to report such losses are repressed in media.
AP reported that two independent Russian media outlets, despite facing challenges of harassment and criminal charges, identified 27,423 dead Russian soldiers by using social media postings and photographs of cemeteries.
According to Dmitry Treshchanin, an editor at one of the outlets, the numbers showed only those soldiers whose names were known and whos deaths were confirmed by multiple reports.
Based on inheritance cases filed with Russian authorities, the data shows that 25,000 such cases, out of 11 million from 2014 to 2023, were opened in 2022 for males aged 15 to 49. The figures rose up to 47,000 as of May 27, 2023.
A White House assessment in May had estimated 20,000 Russian casualties in Ukraine since December 2022. The UK Ministry of Defense in February said that approximately 40,000 to 60,000 Russians were likely to have been killed in the war.
Another estimation by a leaked report by the US Defense Intelligence Agency put Russian military losses at 35,000-40,000.
Dmitry Kobak, a data scientist from Germany’s Tübingen University, reportedly obtained mortality rate based on the categories of age and sex for 2022 from a Russian statistics agency. His analysis found that 24,000 more men died under the age of 50 in 2022 than expected.
However, the data could not show how many men would have died since February last year if the war had not happened, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis from both outlets corrected for the lingering effects of COVID on mortality by indexing male death rates against female deaths.
There are still some uncertainties, such as deaths of older men and how many of the missing men are actually dead since the war began last year.
The war started as a result of simmering tensions following Ukraine's membership bid in the North-Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), threatening Russia's territorial reach. The Russian invasion did not go as smooth as President Vladimir Putin had planned, as they met with stiff resistance from Ukrainian troops and a bouyant response from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
(with AP inputs)
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