Western analysts say Russia is losing 50,000 soldiers a month. A Meduza investigation suggests those estimates are based on manipulated data.

Given the battlefield stalemate in Ukraine, Kyiv’s best remaining hope is attrition — inflicting losses on the Russian army heavy enough to persuade the Kremlin that continuing the war is pointless. In recent weeks, Ukrainian politicians and military commanders have been explicit about this goal. President Zelensky has even put a number on it: 50,000 Russian soldiers killed per month. At first glance, the data seem to suggest that Ukraine is closing in on that target: obituary databases and other open sources show Russian casualties rising sharply through 2025, and many Western analysts have accepted those casualty counts at face value. A new investigation by Meduza reveals that these estimates are almost certainly wrong.

Last year’s spike in recorded Russian casualties most likely reflects a bookkeeping lag, not a turning point on the battlefield.

For four years, casualty estimates have varied wildly, and a persistent methodological problem has made them nearly impossible to evaluate. Most published casualty figures are inflated by the inclusion of wounded soldiers, the majority of whom return to duty. What matters for assessing an army’s actual combat capacity is irreversible losses: the killed, the missing presumed dead, and the small fraction of wounded who are permanently incapacitated.

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Researchers can measure one figure with reasonable confidence: the official death count — soldiers for whom death certificates have been issued. By late summer 2025, that figure stood at roughly 220,000 (excluding foreign nationals fighting with Russian forces and those conscripted in occupied Ukrainian territory). The independent outlet Mediazona’s crowdsourced database of named Russian war dead contained roughly 125,000 entries as of August 2025; researchers estimated that for every confirmed name, approximately 1.76 soldiers had actually died.

Western analysts continue to apply this multiplier to estimate Russia’s current losses.

The problem is that this multiplier is now badly distorted. Since late 2024, Russia’s open legal databases have been inundated with a new category of entry: soldiers previously listed as missing in action who have been declared dead by court order, without their bodies ever being recovered. A law enabling this procedure took effect in May 2023, but the mechanism only began operating at scale roughly 18 months later. The pattern strongly suggests a coordinated Defense Ministry campaign to pressure unit commanders to file missing-persons petitions with civilian courts. The likely motive is bureaucratic: officially declaring missing soldiers dead allows the military to close open cases and entitles families to death benefits they could not otherwise collect.

By late 2025, approximately 90,000 such cases had been opened. After Mediazona first reported on the campaign, courts began removing the filings from their public databases.

The inheritance registry — a notarial database that families typically access within six months of a soldier’s official death — lays the distortion bare. The first graph below tracks inheritance cases for men by the gap between the recorded date of death and the date of official registration. It shows a sharp recent surge in cases where that gap is abnormally long — the telltale pattern of missing-persons cases retroactively reclassified as deaths.

The pattern does not appear in the women’s control group, confirming that the data reflect war deaths, not any broader administrative change in how Russian courts or notaries process cases.

A third graph, tracking the men’s inheritance cases by the date the case was opened rather than the recorded date of death, shows that the vast majority of these delayed cases have been filed within the past year or two — precisely when the Defense Ministry campaign appears to have begun in earnest. Soldiers who went missing in 2022, 2023, and 2024 are now being declared dead en masse, and their deaths are appearing in the databases as 2025 casualties.

In the named-obituary databases, meanwhile, researchers have significantly improved their coverage over the past year, meaning the apparent jump in 2025 entries reflects better data collection as much as higher actual deaths.

The practical implication is that previous years were undercounted, and 2025 is being overcounted. Strip out the retroactive missing-persons reclassifications and correct for the improved database coverage, and current Russian battlefield deaths likely do not exceed 600 per day. Adding the severely wounded who cannot return to service brings total irreversible losses to roughly 900 per day — about 27,000 per month. That is less than half of Zelensky’s target, and it is probably not rising fast enough to force a strategic crisis on the Russian side in the near term.

The broader lesson of this analysis is not simply that one set of numbers is wrong. Rather, the methodology underlying many published Western estimates has a structural flaw: it applies a multiplier derived from historical data to a database that the Russian state is now actively manipulating. As Moscow has grown more systematic about processing its missing soldiers, the raw inputs feeding Western casualty models have become less reliable, not more. The apparent spike in Russian deaths through 2025 is, in large part, a data artifact, and the strategic conclusions analysts are drawing from it deserve serious scrutiny.