By Galina Korol and AFP | 2024-12-11

KYIV -- A relative of Russian President Vladimir Putin accidentally revealed a confidential figure that might yield insight into the extent of Russia's war dead in Ukraine.

Video published by the independent Astra Telegram channel December 3 showed Anna Tsivilyova, the daughter of Putin's cousin and a deputy defense minister, saying in late November that the government had received tens of thousands of appeals from relatives related to the tracking and identification of missing soldiers through DNA samples.

"The MVD [Interior Ministry] takes it [DNA] absolutely free of charge ... and at its own expense enters into its database all relatives who have applied to us. I've already said 48,000," Tsivilyova said at a meeting with in the video.

Moments later, State Duma defense committee chief Andrei Kartapolov asked her not to disclose this number.

"This is such sensitive, closed information. And when we draw up the final documents, we should not include these figures anywhere," he said, addressing her.

"I didn't mention the numbers of the missing but of the appeals to us [by relatives]," responded Tsivilyova.

It is not clear whether the number she provided -- 48,000 -- refers to the number of cases of individual missing soldiers or the number of individual appeals to the ministry by relatives.

The exchange took place at a parliamentary hearing in late November and it was recorded as it was live streamed on the parliament's website, said Astra.

Russia's Defense Ministry posted images and video from what appeared to be the same meeting in the State Duma on November 26, but the clip was not available on government sites.

Various estimates

The Kremlin does not disclose its casualties, but its perpetual sweetening of financial incentives to join the army and its "renting" of North Koreans to fight in Ukraine make clear that its losses are enormous.

As of December 9, Ukrainian forces had eliminated more than 750,000 Russian troops, the Ukrainian general staff said on Facebook. The number includes both wounded and killed.

"This is a war of attrition. It's a brutal war. The losses are big, much bigger than in Afghanistan and Chechnya," Yevgeny Stupin, a Russian rights activist, lawyer and former member of the Moscow city council, told Kontur.

Stupin now lives abroad.

Washington, almost two months earlier, gave a similarly dire number.

As of the beginning of October, Russia's losses in the war totaled 115,000 killed and 500,000 wounded, The New York Times (NYT) reported, citing a Pentagon estimate.

In late November, the BBC Russian service and independent Russian news site Mediazona said they had found the names of 80,973 Russian troops killed in the Ukraine war since February 2022 by consulting open sources.

Investigators "emphasize that the actual death toll is higher, as not all casualty reports make it into publicly available sources," Meduza.io reported November 29.

Examining inheritance data with statistical tools, Meduza and Mediazona investigative journalists estimated that Russia's total military deaths reached almost 150,000 by the end of October, NYT reported November 19.

'Meat wave' assaults

Russian troops are dying in such excessive numbers in part because they regularly launch poorly protected "meat wave" assaults against heavily armed Ukrainian defensive positions.

"In some sections of the front the kill ratio for us is 1 to 10, and in some places 1 to 5," Serhii Grabsky, a Ukrainian reservist colonel who co-founded the Association of Participants in Peacekeeping Operations, a Ukrainian NGO, told Kontur.

For practically the first time in the past two years, Russian forces in October began making significant territorial gains in eastern Donbas. But it came at Pyrrhic human cost.

"In October, the Russian occupying troops set a record for personnel losses -- 41,980. These are the highest losses for the Russian occupying troops in one month since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine," Alexander Kovalenko, a military correspondent for InfoResist, wrote on Facebook November 2.

"Forty thousand men in one month is 10,000 more than Russia has the luxury of mobilizing," Grabsky said.

But at the same time, "right now the foe is not paying any regard to any losses at all," he added.

Russia's indifference to sacrificing its own troops is leading analysts to predict a continued spiraling upward of casualties.

Counting obituaries

Ethnic minorities, especially non-European ones, are suffering disproportionate losses as Russia shields Moscow and St. Petersburg from the impact of war.

"Starting in August, losses surged," Valentina Bazarova, an analyst for the Free Buryatia Foundation, told Kontur. "Whereas previously fatalities for [the Buryat Republic] were stable at two to three men a day, now they're stable at four to five men a day."

The Buryat Republic, a small part of Russia named for the Asiatic Buryat ethnic group, had a population of only about 979,000 in 2021.

Bazarova's organization monitors Buryat troops' obituaries that appear in open sources.

"As of November 26, the number of fatalities had already broken the October record, which was 103 deaths. Now it's nearly the end of the month, and we've already counted 113 fatalities," Bazarova said, referring only to residents of Buryatia.

"You sense that human resources aren't valued at all. Guys who are 19 or 20 years old are dying there in the first month after they sign their contract," she said. "Its clear why. These are just kids who don't know how to fight."

However, Bazarova has no way of knowing what percentage of Buryat troops is dying.

"We don't know how many ... soldiers from Buryatia were sent to war," she said. The death toll among them "could be 1%, or maybe it's 10%."

Accuracy of the investigation

Aware of the perception problem, Moscow keeps its recruiting and casualty statistics strictly confidential.

"It is difficult to obtain concrete information about Russian casualties, which comprise deaths and injuries," the NYT reported November 19. "Moscow has an incentive to minimize its losses and rarely discloses any information; Ukraine and its allies have an incentive to overstate them."

Ukrainians like Grabsky express skepticism about the numbers published by independent Russian researchers like Mediazona and Meduza.

"We have rows of graves in Ukraine packed with corpses of Russian soldiers that no one is collecting and that no one in Russia wants to take back," said Grabsky.

Whole categories of Moscow's war dead are going uncounted, he observed.

"If we're talking about ... non-Russian citizens, or so-called volunteer units or private military companies, who's counting them?" Grabsky said.

Even the deaths of full-fledged Russian soldiers can be hushed up because acknowledging them requires payments to the bereaved, he said.