Media investigation identifies 66,000 Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine
Mediazona said Saturday according to its estimates more than 66,000 Russian military personnel have died during the war in Ukraine.
Mediazona has been drawing up a list of known soldier deaths in conjunction with the BBC Russian Service using open-source data.
Previously in April, they announced they had found more than 50,000 names of Russians killed.
Mediazona said Saturday that «as of August 30, we know the names of 66,471 Russian soldiers killed in the war».
The list has gone up by more than 4,600 in the last four weeks, it said, while stressing this was not a definitive figure since many soldiers' deaths are not made public.
Anastasia Alekseyeva, a journalist at Mediazona, stressed that the latest death numbers were «not linked to Ukraine's offensive in the Kursk region or Russia's advance in the east».
This is because researchers are still working through a backlog of death reports, she said.
The report found that 172 conscripts doing national service have been killed in the war, with the highest figures in early months.
However these figures may be inexact since conscripts can sign professional army contracts and some may have done so without telling relatives, Mediazona editor Dmitry Treshchanin said.
According to Mediazona's breakdown, the region with the largest absolute number of deaths — 2,578 — is the southern republic of Bashkortostan, which has a large Muslim population.
The most represented age group overall was 33-35 (6,877 deaths).
More than 12,000 of the dead were prisoners, after
