MOSCOW: The Kremlin declined to comment Tuesday after Russian independent news site Mediazona in collaboration with the BBC Russian Service published details of over 95,000 Russian soldiers killed fighting Ukraine, based on open-access data.
Mediazona published on Monday, the third anniversary of the offensive, an infographic with images and official reports of deaths of soldiers from various sources including social media, news reports and obituaries.
It was presented as a graphic of thousands of photos of soldiers forming an image of a famous 1871 painting by Russian artist Vasily Vereshchagin called “The Apotheosis of War”, depicting a huge pile of skulls.
Each entry includes accessible information on the soldier including age and date of death, region and unit and photograph in some cases.
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The online list at 200.zona.media currently stands at 95,300. Mediazona and the BBC have been updating the list since the offensive began.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told AFP on Tuesday he was not aware of the publication and neither confirmed nor denied the toll.
“I don’t know if it’s true or not,” he said, calling information on death tolls “the exclusive prerogative” of the defence ministry.
Russia rarely gives casualty figures for the conflict.
The defence ministry said in September 2022 that 5,937 soldiers had been killed in combat.
At the end of 2024, then-US defence secretary Lloyd Austin spoke of 700,000 Russian soldiers who were killed or wounded.
Mediazona was founded by Russian opposition activist Pyotr Verzilov, who helped form the Pussy Riot punk group and has fought on the side of Ukraine.
The site has been declared a “foreign agent” by Russia and Verzilov has been put on a list of extremists and convicted in absentia for allegedly distributing false information on the army.
The platform puts the Russian death total so far this year at 393 while it lists 26,102 death reports for 2024.
But it says the real number of Russian deaths in the offensive must be much higher, since not all deaths are reported publicly.
In conjunction with the independent news site Meduza, it estimated this week that 165,000 Russians had been killed, based on its own list and an official register of inheritance proceedings.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky told US broadcaster NBC this month that more than 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed and around 380,000 wounded, while other estimates have been much higher.
Independent Ukrainian war correspondent Yuri Butusov said in December that his army sources estimated 70,000 dead and 35,000 missing.
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