Dead souls and counting The sixth installment in Meduza’s joint investigation into Russian war deaths adds 90,000 soldiers previously outside the tally and explains why the total will only rise

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Since Russian soldiers started dying in droves in Ukraine, one category of these men has been especially hard to count. Soldiers who disappeared without recoverable remains — whose deaths left no body for a civil registry to record — existed somewhere between the methodologically cautious open-source investigations by journalists at Mediazona and BBC’s Russian Service and the unverifiable casualty counts released by the Ukrainian military. Calculating these deaths was nearly impossible — until now.

Since 2024, two things have changed in Russian public records that, read together, make this category countable for the first time. Court petitions to declare soldiers dead or missing have spiked — beginning in July 2024 — from a pre-surge baseline of roughly 8,100 annual filings to 22,900 in 2024 and 79,800 in 2025. Subsequently, Russia’s federal inheritance registry has accumulated more than 52,000 entries in which the delay between a recorded death date and its registration is six months or more — a lag that was virtually nonexistent before 2024 and, almost without exception, marks deaths recognized by courts rather than civil registries.

The Defense Ministry is the primary driver of the court-petition signal, filing requests to clear unit rosters of “dead souls” — soldiers listed as active whose deaths were never formally acknowledged. Court-recognized deaths almost always show up in Russia’s inheritance registry as long-delayed registrations. Meduza could not determine why these filings didn’t begin until 15 months after a 2023 law simplified the declaration of missing soldiers as dead.

By drawing on these court petitions and long-delayed inheritance cases, this sixth installment in Meduza’s joint investigation with Mediazona and the BBC counts roughly 90,000 Russian soldiers our previous five reports could not account for, arriving at a new total of 352,000 Russian military dead from the start of the full-scale invasion through the end of 2025.

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Four inputs

The 352,000 figure has two components, each measured differently. The 261,000 ordinary KIA follow the same methodology Meduza has used since July 2023: tracking excess inheritance filings for young men and calibrating the excess against named lists of identified dead soldiers. The roughly new 90,000 are soldiers whom the Russian state recognized as dead or missing through its judicial apparatus rather than its civil registries, tallied through court petition filings and long-delayed inheritance registrations. These counts cover Russian nationals only; casualties among non-Russian fighters on Russia’s side are not included.

The named list compiled by Mediazona and the BBC is a running database of individually identified Russian soldiers killed in the war. Matching it against the registry establishes how many deaths in a given cohort generate filings and on what timeline — a ratio the methodology uses to convert excess filings into excess deaths.

Ordinary KIA show up in Russia’s inheritance registry the same way across all six installments of our investigation: as a surge in filings for young men, in which registration lagged behind the death date by two weeks to six months. Until recently, Russian inheritance filings with a lag of six months or more were rare, but more than 52,000 have accumulated since 2024.

The fourth input in our investigation is a court petition dataset: national filing statistics supplemented by a sample of 3,800 full decision texts covering roughly one-third of Russia’s regions, obtained by Mediazona from a source in Russia’s judicial system. That sample shows what the aggregate filings represent: 68 percent recognized the soldier as dead, 13 percent as missing, and the remaining 18 percent as procedural — rejections, corrections, or re-filings.

Still counting

Our 352,000 figure will grow as more data arrives. For ordinary KIA in recent months, the count is still filling in. Inheritance cases take time; most arrive within six months of a death, so the tally for late 2025 is incomplete. It will rise as those filings reach the registry. For soldiers who went missing in the second half of 2025, the count hasn’t even begun — a soldier must be missing for at least six months before a court petition can be filed. None of those cases has had time to reach the courts.

The coefficient

To convert excess inheritance filings into a death count, our methodology uses a coefficient calibrated on career officers — the most stable subgroup in the list compiled by Mediazona and the BBC — then adjusted for the war’s shifting composition as mobilized conscripts, Wagner recruits, and volunteers entered the force. The rate reflects how reliably deaths in a given cohort generate late-registered inheritance filings. Applied in reverse, it converts excess filings into an estimated death count.

For soldiers’ deaths recognized through courts, however, no such check exists. Those soldiers rarely appear in named lists — there are few public records (such as obituaries) for men declared dead by courts many months or years after disappearing. Still, Meduza extrapolates the same coefficient to this group, assuming these cases generate inheritance filings at roughly the same rate as ordinary KIA — an assumption we acknowledge cannot be verified.

Two independent methods differ by only 3,500 deaths: the coefficient applied to long-delayed registry entries yields roughly 90,000, and excess court filings above Russia’s pre-surge baseline amount to 86,500. That convergence is what makes 90,000 our central estimate — but both figures tend to run high: the court figure assumes each excess filing represents a distinct person, while the coefficient was calibrated on men whose deaths left public records — an assumption that weakens for soldiers who vanished without a trace. In short: 52,000–61,900 is what the data most directly support, while 90,000 is what our methodology infers.

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