Russian casualties surge despite US peace talks
Based on open-source data, the BBC, together with Mediazona and a team of volunteers, have identified the names of 103,275 Russian military personnel killed in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Over the last two months, while Russia was negotiating a possible peace agreement with the United States, the number of casualties on the front line did not decrease; on the contrary, it even increased faster than before, according to the BBC Russian service.
These estimates are based on the trend in the publication of obituaries for Russian servicemen, the cited source states.
Starting in February 2025, Russian and American officials held periodic discussions regarding an agreement in Ukraine. Based on the published information about deceased servicemen, the BBC sought to analyze how these discussions affected the intensity of hostilities. "We took the visit of US President's special envoy Steve Witkoff to Moscow on February 11 as a starting point," emphasizes the article's author, Olga Ivshina.
The list of deceased servicemen compiled by the BBC is updated with a delay. Firstly, because information about military deaths does not immediately reach relatives and does not immediately appear in open sources.
Secondly, the cited source notes that some publications require additional verification, and some reports "we simply do not have time to analyze as quickly as they are published."
"As a result, we are not yet able to provide an approximate number of Russian servicemen killed between February and April 2025," states the article's author, adding that "the number of obituaries published daily can provide an idea of the intensity of the fighting."
A key conclusion from the analysis by the BBC Russian service is that "during the two and a half months of Russia-US negotiations, more obituaries for Russian servicemen were published than in the preceding three months of fighting."
More specifically, the cited source states, "in February, an average of 234 obituaries were published per day, which exceeds the 2024 average by 1.5 times."
Translation by Iurie Tataru
