Older Russian Men and Ethnic Minorities Disproportionately Dying in Kremlin’s War Against Ukraine

Executive Summary:

• Russian fatality estimates in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine vary widely, but analysis of open-source data suggests they exceed 175,000 between February 2022 and July 2025.
• Older Russian men and ethnic minorities are disproportionately dying in the war—many deaths come from regions such as Buryatia, Bashkiria, and Tatarstan, while Moscow and St. Petersburg contribute relatively fewer fatalities.
• Ahiska Turks are estimated to be overrepresented by approximately 800 percent in fatality data, while Cossack mobilization structures increase the proportion of losses in certain regions, showing how Russia’s war strains vulnerable and semi-organized groups.

Nowhere is the well-worn saying that “truth is the first casualty of war” more applicable than in casualty estimates for Russia’s war against Ukraine. U.K. intelligence estimates Russia has passed one million casualties since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with more than 260,000 casualties in 2025 so far (The New Voice of Ukraine, August 5). Russian sources such as Defense Minister Andrei Belousov claim Ukraine has suffered over one million casualties, with 560,000 in 2024 alone (RTVI, December 16, 2024). The term “casualties” encompasses both those who have died and those who are injured so badly they cannot return to the front, so casualty counts are vague on this point alone.

Efforts to identify the number of dead using open-source intelligence continue. Projects that distinguish fatalities from casualties highlight the sorest aspect of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine for Russians. When fathers, brothers, and sons do not return home from war, relatives might be expected to hold the authorities accountable. Three primary organizations are tracking Russian deaths in the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine. These organizations use open-source materials to count deaths, which often results in incomplete information and may lead to undercounting of fatalities. The most prominent attempt to count Russian fatalities comes from Mediazona, which works with the BBC Russian Service and a team of volunteers (Mediazona, accessed August 5). The PoterNET site also counts deaths (Poter.NET, accessed August 5). The final source is an X account, “Mancer,” which has tracked Russian deaths since Putin’s 2014 invasion of Crimea rather than just since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (X/@666_mancer, accessed August 5). While all three sources represent the best available data on Russian fatalities in the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine, this article primarily uses the Mancer data since its spreadsheet format makes data analysis more straightforward (Google Sheets/Gruz 200, accessed August 28).

This author analyzed the Mancer data using Gemini and Google Colabs, since the dataset is too large to upload into a regular Large Language Model (LLM) (Google Colabs, Russian war fatalities, accessed August 27). Broadly speaking, the data supports the widely reported figures of Russian casualties passing the symbolic one million mark in June 2025, the older age distribution of fatalities, disproportionate fatalities of ethnic minorities, and observations concerning the Cossack and the Ahiska Turk roles in the war.  

Total Number of Fatalities

According to the Mancer data, the total number of confirmed Russian fatalities where the name of the deceased is known between February 2022 and July 2025 is just under 175,000 (see Figure 1). The Mancer data set showed significantly more fatalities with known names for this time period than PoterNET (80,167) and Mediazona (121,507). Mediazona estimates that 220,000 Russians have died since the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in a separate calculation based on registered inheritance cases relative to pre-war figures rather than on individualized names of the dead (Mediazona, accessed September 3). Sources that seek to list each individual Russian fatality almost certainly undercount the entire number, but there is no reason to see any of them as a biased sample of the cases—each account represents some part of the total fatalities. 

The relaxed gradient of Figure 1 after the end of 2023 suggests a decline in the rapidity of fatalities consistent with the stabilization of the battle lines in Donbas, but this may also be because bad news takes time to filter back to the families. Mediazona’s data shows an increase in the number of fatalities by name from 35,934 in 2023 to 39,375 in 2024. In May 2024, Mediazona and the BBC’s list of names estimated that some 53,586 people had died in the war, but the Mancer data in Figure 1 shows almost three times as many deaths by July 2024 (Radio Svoboda, May 17, 2024). This discrepancy suggests significant upward revision over time as more data becomes available, and families share their grief on social media. A similar ratio would result in total actual fatalities through July 2025 exceeding 250,000. Given that there are typically three times as many nonfatal casualties as fatalities in war, estimates of Russian casualties totaling one million as of mid-June 2025 are plausible (Belfer Center, November 2014).  

Figure 1: Total Number of Russian Fatalities

Several sources have reported that older Russians are being disproportionately deployed to the front lines, a finding supported by analysis of the Mancer data (see EDM, October 24, 2024; Firstpost, February 25). This is also true of Ukrainians, who are seeking to preserve the child-producing generation in fear of a demographic cliff ahead (Forces News, December 19, 2024). Figure 2 shows that the greatest number of deaths of Russian soldiers over 40 came in 2023. Since 2023, the greatest number of deaths has been seen in the 31–40 age bracket. While not the ideal fighting age, this reflects the demographic realities of Russian society and who is most likely to enlist. An audio recording features Russian lawmaker Aleksandr Borodai claiming the military brass view reserve and contract soldiers as “second-rate infantry” and thus expendable to soak up Ukraine’s firepower. They are often mobilized through one of the quasi-private military companies (PMCs) such as Redoubt or Dobrakor, which have come to dominate the Russian landscape (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, July 17). Since the outbreak of the war, numerous PMCs have been created in Russia, such as the one run by Gazprom, regional militias, and Crimean Governor Sergey Aksyonov’s private army known as Konvoy (Charter97, May 29, 2023; Novaya Gazeta, September 22, 2023). Those who died in the first year of the war were disproportionately likely to be young, in their 20s, probably reflecting their status as active duty trained professionals and conscripts sent into the initial fighting in expectation of an easy victory. Given the sheer number of deaths in the primary child-producing generation—to say nothing of the approximately 700,000 Russian men who fled after partial mobilization was introduced in 2022—the war will compound the country’s steep demographic decline (see EDM, October 11, 2022).

Figure 2: Age Cohort of Russian Deaths, by Year

The fatality burden of the war is falling disproportionately on ethnic minorities (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, July 17; London School of Economics and Political Science, July 31). Although the Mancer data is not comprehensive, it is a large enough sample to be representative of cases by ethnicity (Figure 3). Because many entries do not include the individual’s home region, Figure 3 shows significantly lower numbers of overall Russian fatalities than the aggregate numbers. There is no reason to consider this data systematically biased, with the possible exception that one might expect deaths from metropolises such as Moscow or St. Petersburg to be shared online more frequently than those from rural areas where internet coverage may be spotty. 

The fact that Buryatia, Bashkiria, and Tatarstan are the regions producing the most fatalities, even without weighing for their share of the Russian population, is striking (Figure 3). The Mediazona data supports this overall insight with some differences in numbers: Buryatia (3,048), Bashkiria (5,889), Tatarstan (5,565), Dagestan (1,607), Moscow oblast (3,482), and Crimea (1,032) (Mediazona, accessed August 8). The outsized impact of the war on regions with a large percentage of non-ethnic Russian peoples is even more stark when their fatalities are considered as a proportion of the total population. This is most true of Buryatia, whose population has suffered almost three times as many fatalities as one might expect from their weight in Russia’s census, followed by Zabaykalsky krai (2.48 times as many fatalities), Bashkiria (1.74), and Tatarstan (1.68). The corresponding numbers for Moscow and St. Petersburg are disproportionately low, considering their share of the population.

Figure 3: Fatalities by Confirmed Region

The Ahiska Turks, an ethnic-minority group within Russia, may have also suffered disproportionate fatalities in Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, influenced by their small population. Because the Ahiska are not identified with any one region of the Russian Federation but spread out over multiple regions and are very few in number, this author used Google Collabs and Gemini to identify Ahiska fatalities by name (see EDM, August 2, 2022; see Jamestown Perspectives, November 14, 2024). This author used records of the census in the predominantly Ahiska Adigeni region of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) before they were deported in 1944 to the Uzbek SSR to find the 25 most common Ahiska names (Poiskvoih.ru, February 10, 2013). This method is not foolproof because it is not certain that the names are exclusively Ahiska, and the most popular names could have changed over time. Many of Russia’s ethnic minorities are Muslim, and there may be some similarity in naming conventions among them, but this analysis provides insight into how Muslim minorities in Russia have been disproportionately affected by casualties in Russia’s war. Analysis of the Mancer database revealed that 0.48 percent of all listed fatalities had one of the 25 most popular Ahiska names from the 1944 census data. Only about 90,000 Ahiska are left in Russia, 0.00006 percent of the population, indicating that the Ahiska may be overrepresented in the Mancer fatality list by some 800 percent. Even allowing for overlap with other ethnic minority groups, the overrepresentation is remarkable, supporting claims from numerous asylum seekers that the Ahiska are being targeted for recruitment and then sent to the most dangerous parts of the front line (Original Interviews Conducted by the Author, July 2025). The number of Ahiska deaths would presumably have been even worse had a 2004 refugee resettlement program not removed thousands of Ahiska from Russia to the United States. [1]

Cossack Fatalities

The registered Russian Cossacks are not an ethnic minority despite the best efforts of the Nationalities Ministry to present them as such (FADN Rossii, February 16, 2024). It is difficult to use a name or region-based methodology to track Cossack fatalities because they are not an exclusively ethnic group tied to a specific place and because there is no such thing as a “Cossack name” (see EDM, March 23, 2023). There are a few isolated “heroic” deaths recounted on the Cossack websites, such as Vladimir Popov, but no systematic accounting of them (VsKO, November 5, 2023). Fatality trackers do not always note the Cossack affiliation of a departed fighter, even when they are advertised as such on Cossack websites. According to the Mediazona data, which puts the total number of fatalities at 121,507 between February 2022 and August 2025, there have been a total of 3,537 fatalities from Krasnodar krai, the region with one of the largest and best-established Cossack host, which sent many soldiers to the 2014 invasion of Crimea. Of the total fatalities from Krasnodar krai, 773 were listed as “volunteers,” which would include Cossacks, and 972 had no data. Although some Cossacks could be in the regular military, most of those mentioned by Cossack authorities are there on ostensibly voluntary grounds, and are an important component of Russian military forces (see EDM, July 16). Some of the dead from Krasnodar krai are at least connected to the Cossacks. Oleg Karchenkov’s obituary was surrounded by links to Cossack websites and references to Kuban Ataman Alexander Vlasov (Bezformata, September 5, 2024). Anatoliy Tregub, who was killed in January 2025, had his memorial posted by the Cossack news service for the region (VKontakte/Kazachiy Vestnik Dinskovo Rayonna, February 2). Fatalities listed on the Cossack website, such as Oleg Bitsura, are captured by the Mediazona data but are not categorized as Cossack (Slava Kubani, August 18, 2023). Vitaly Kuznetsov, head of the All-Russian Cossack society, claims there were 19,000 Cossacks in some 27 volunteer units in the warzone and some 46,000 have had some kind of deployment against Ukraine (VsKO, May 15).

There is mixed evidence to support the contention that regions with large Cossack movements are seeing higher rates of fatalities. In Orenburg oblast, a region with an active and large Cossack movement, the fatality count, according to Mediazona, is 2,364, representing 1.95 percent of all recorded fatalities compared to the 1.27 percent of the population it contains according to the 2021 census (Mediazona, accessed August 4). The respective fatality rates are also significantly higher for Zabaykalsky krai, and the Volgograd (part of the Don Cossack host) and Saratov (part of the Volga Cossack host) oblasts. The three regions perhaps most associated with the Cossacks (Krasnodar krai and Rostov and Stavropol oblasts), however, all have a slightly lower share of Mediazona’s fatalities than would be suggested by the size of their populations. This may in part be because many elderly Russians who could not serve in a conflict choose to retire to these warmer climates. The evidence of combat deaths in Cossack websites, however, supports the contention that Cossack fatalities are disproportionately high. 

Conclusion

The analysis of Russian fatalities in Putin’s war against Ukraine supports the total number of casualties being over one million. The data also supports conventional wisdom that soldiers in this war are much older than is typical and that ethnic minorities are dying at higher rates than ethnic Russians. This analysis offers new insights concerning the massive burden on Ahiska Turks in the war and the hidden contribution of Cossack mobilizational structures. Russian men dying in the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine will have impacts on the Eurasian landmass for decades to come, regardless of how Putin’s war against Ukraine ends.

Note:

[1] This author has worked closely with the Ahiska Turk diaspora in the United States in Dayton, Ohio, and has worked as an expert witness in providing affidavits for asylum applications, including on cases involving several applicants who received military draft notices on the street in Rostov and other locations (see Jamestown Perspectives, November 14, 2024).