50,000 Russian soldiers may have already died Why the Republicans rush against the FBI

47,000: that is the number of Russian soldiers who would have died in the offensive war against Ukraine at the end of May. If you count not only the dead, but also the seriously injured who can no longer fight, the number rises to 125,000.

This was reported last Monday by the independent Russian-language online portals “Meduza” and “Mediazona”, citing extensive calculations and a data analysis by Dmitry Kobak, a researcher at the University of Tübingen.

According to Meduza, the most reliable figures to date come from independent observers working with Mediazona and the BBC. They counted deaths through obituaries in local newspapers and social media and came to a figure of nearly 27,000 deaths.

By order of President Putin, information about war victims in Russia is kept secret. People who report such deaths via social media, for example, are prosecuted.

The fact that this earlier number was lower is partly due to the fear of repression and criminal prosecution. However, many of the dead also came from the self-proclaimed People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk or were recruited from the prison system – in other words, they were people who are often not missing in Russia.

Ten times more dead than in the Afghan war

The last time the Russian Defense Ministry commented on the number of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine was last September. According to that account, by that time 5,937 had been killed in the “special military operation”.

It cannot be assumed that the warring parties will give realistic figures for their own losses. Part of war is minimizing one’s own losses and exaggerating those of the enemy.

Nevertheless, the number would not be reassuring from a Russian point of view, even if it were really correct. The Defense Ministry has admitted that Ukraine killed ten times more soldiers in seven months than during the entire 1978-1989 war between the former Soviet Union and Afghanistan.

According to the authors of the analysis, they used two different bases for their calculations. On the one hand, figures from a database on inheritances in Russia. On the other hand, an official death rate. While the former runs until the end of May 2023, the latter only refers to the year 2022.

However, the results for 2022 were very close to each other for both calculation methods. “We therefore assume that our calculations are also correct until the end of May 2023,” say the authors.

The numbers are not only remarkable because they show how many people Vladimir Putin sent to his death. They are also impressive because they show how much effort the regime must go to, given their size, to hide them from the public.