Russia loses hundreds of thousands of soldiers and Ukraine changes the course of the war

Its military strategy, assistance in Western weapons and, above all, its industrial capacity to produce thousands of attack drones a day. They turned the lands of southeastern Ukraine into lands of blood, as the historian Timothy Snyder wrote. Russia, according to the latest data, lost at least 352,000 men in that war between 2022 and 2025. So far this year that figure could have reached 400,000.

The data is from two independent Russian media, Mediazona and Meduzaand refer to male men between 18 and 59 years old.

The two media, whose information during these more than four years of war have been precise, They use a new statistical methodology that is based on two large data sources.

One is Russian inheritance register -a public database that collects all inheritances in the country- and the other is a list of deceased soldiers that Mediazona has been developing with internal sources in the Armed Forces. At the end of 2025, that list had more than 215,000 names.

The Inheritance Registry includes all deceased Russian citizens who they leave assets as inheritance. When the journalists of those two media they crossed that data With the registry of deceased soldiers that they were preparing, they used a statistical probability based on age and social position. The older you are and the more assets you have, the more likely you are to leave an inheritance.

The difference in data that occurs between the different records is explained, according to these means, because the bodies were never recovered of tens of thousands of dead soldiers. In at least 90,000 cases of those 352,000 dead soldiers, their deaths were declared with a six month delay by the judicial authorities.

Russian courts received, these media report, few requests to declare military personnel missing or deceased until mid-2024.

The war was going better for Russiafewer men died and the bodies of those who died were recovered. But that was changing. Since 2024, requests for these declarations of disappearance or death They have been increasing until reaching those 90,000.

The war has been turning little by little in favor of Ukraine. Russia has barely made any progress on any part of the front for months and Ukraine does, especially since it turned its entire territory into a continuous man-hunting game from small attack drones.

European diplomatic sources have been explaining for weeks that Russia is unable to replace all men that he is losing on the front and that he is already moving on the defensive.

Ukraine has broken all expectations. To depend absolutely on Western weapons (and only European ones since January 2025 because the United States turned off the tap since Donald Trump returned to the White House) to be courted to participate in European defense contracts.

Ukraine is today the leading military power on the continent, the largest army and the only one truly trained for a major war.