Mediazona, BBC News Russian, and a team of volunteers have have been meticulously maintaining our own list of fallen soldiers since May 2022.
Usually, we didn’t use the register to search for new casualties, but rather to supplement and refine the existing data.
We compared the number of opened probate cases in our sample with the complete mortality data for pre-war years in Russia.
By determining this ratio, we can learn about the excess mortality of Russian men in 2022 and 2023.
To estimate the overall military mortality, we also cross-reference our list of killed soldiers with the probate cases.
While Meduza and Mediazona examined probate registry data, Dmitry Kobak looked into the Rosstat data set.
Mediazona achecked a random sample of records from this file against leaks from Russian state databases; all data fully matched. »