Over 95,000 people fighting for Russia’s military have now died as the war in Ukraine enters the fourth year, according to data analysed by the BBC.
This figure doesn’t include those who were killed serving in the militia of the self-proclaimed Donbas republics which we estimate to be between 21,000 and 23,500 fighters.
BBC Russian, independent media group Mediazona and volunteers have been counting deaths since February 2022.
The list includes names of the deceased that we verified using information from official reports, newspapers, social media, and new memorials and graves. The real death toll is believed to be much higher.
Drafted and disposable
Daniil Dudnikov, a 21-year-old history student at Donetsk National University, was reading international relations and enjoyed swimming.
On the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, on 24 February 2022, the authorities in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic forcibly mobilised Daniil and despatched him to the Kharkiv region.
Just a month later, on 25 March, Daniil went missing in action. Of the 18 soldiers in his unit, none returned. 13 were killed, and five were taken prisoner. Four months later, following a prisoner exchange, those who had survived confirmed that Daniil had been one of the 13 killed in combat.
Daniil’s story mirrors those of thousands of other residents from the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, created in 2014 by Moscow-backed separatists in the predominantly Russian-speaking parts of eastern Ukraine.
With the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, civilian men were drafted en masse, often inadequately trained and poorly equipped before being assigned to near-impossible missions. This resulted in a staggering number of dead and missing soldiers, the fate of whom often remains unknown for months or years.
