by Eric Zuesse, The Duran:
On 26 September 2024, the U.S. Government’s Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) buried in a news-report their estimate that around 70,000 Russians have definitely been killed in action in Ukraine; they emphasized that the death-toll was disproportionately high in a few regions of the country, and so headlined negatively “RFE/RL Reveals Spike In War Deaths From Russia’s Ethnic Regions”. Like U.S.-and-allied-billionaires-controlled ‘news’-media usually do, it focused its report on the allegedly divergent interests of different ethnic groups, instead of on the inevitably divergent interests of the mega-rich investors versus the general public; they do so in order to distract and divide-and-rule the public so they won’t know that America’s investors in firms such as Lockheed Martin are profiting enormously from this war and are in control over the U.S. Government, to continue it.
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Anyway, RFE/RL stated that, “On September 20, the BBC Russian/Mediazona project — which tracks war deaths by monitoring funeral notices and other open-source data — reported it had confirmed more than 70,000 killed soldiers nationwide.” Translated into English, that BBC article was headlined “70,000 dead: what is known about Russia’s losses in Ukraine by the end of September”. It reported:
Using open data, the BBC, together with the publication Mediazona* and a team of volunteers, identified the names of more than 70,000 Russian soldiers killed during the invasion of Ukraine. Every fifth person killed was a person who decided to sign a contract with the Russian army or the Russian National Guard after the war had already begun.
Thousands of obituaries show how the image of the average Russian fighter changed during the invasion.
While in 2022 the typical soldier whose death was confirmed by the BBC was around 21 years old and a contract soldier serving in elite units such as the special forces, airborne forces or marines, today it is increasingly men in their 40s, 50s and even 60s who are sent to the front, often without combat experience or special training.
From civilian life to the front
More than half of all the dead we identified were not connected with the army at the start of the war.
The largest category of Russian military casualties at the moment are volunteers. These newly minted contract soldiers are very different from professional soldiers: for many years before the war they worked in the civilian sector, and before being sent to the front they underwent training that lasted from three to ten days.
We have established that at least 13,781 volunteers died in the war – this is 20% of the total number of confirmed losses on the Russian side. Since September 2024, the losses of volunteers have exceeded the losses of other categories of war participants, including prisoners (19% of all confirmed deaths) and mobilized (13%).
Currently, volunteers aged 42 to 50 are the ones who most often die in war – there are 4,100 of them on our list, which is 30% of all those killed in this category. The oldest volunteer who died was 71 years old, and in total, 250 volunteers over 60 years old died in the war.
Units made up of volunteers began to play a significant role in the Russian invasion of Ukraine as early as April 2022. The military command began to protect the paratroopers and special forces who survived the first months of the invasion, using them to hold positions and conduct sniper operations.
In late 2022 and early 2023, the most difficult sections of the front began to be covered by prisoner units. However, by early 2024, the importance of these units had diminished: the human resources of this category were gradually exhausted.
Since October 2023, we have been recording a sharp and stable increase in losses among volunteers. This coincided with the start of a new wave of Russian offensive on Avdiivka. At the same time, losses among mobilized and prisoners, for example, remained at approximately the same level.
Judging by the published obituaries, it is the recruitment of volunteers that is now the main way to replenish the ranks of Russian military personnel stationed in Ukraine.
