A dossier based on months of work, grave counts, satellite images, interviews with victims’ families and open-source information from media, newspapers and online social media, for the first time quantifies Russian victims in the conflict in Ukraine. And i numbers are eight times higher than the official ones provided by Moscow. Together, the BBC and the independent publishing group Mediazona have collected this large amount of data since February 2022.
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«In the second 12 months on the front line – while Moscow was pushing its so-called meat grinder strategy – we found that the number of deaths was almost 25% higher than in the first year» they write.
And the analysis does not include the deaths of militiamen in Donetsk and Luhansk, in eastern Ukraine, occupied by the Russians. If they were added, the death toll on the Russian side would be even higher.
The phrase “meat grinder strategy” was used to describe the way Moscow relentlessly sent in waves of soldiers to try to weaken Ukrainian forces and expose their positions to Russian artillery. «Human waves of frontal assaults, often useless», consisting of insufficiently trained and equipped people, according to theInstitute for the Study of War.
The most impressive thing in the study by BBC and Mediazona, it is noted how the composition of the Russian forces has changed: while in the first six months of the conflict it was mainly soldiers who died, afterwards it was mainly civilian recruits, whose number reaches two, even three times that of the regular forces. Among them, also the convicts freed for this purpose and the volunteers. To these, there is a significant number of people who could not be identified.
According to the dossier, there were 9,000 former Russian prisoners who died on the front, sent to the slaughterhouse without training and often without suitable equipment. From the time of their enlistment with Wagner, they did not last more than two or three months in battle.
The most significant peaks of human losses are recorded in correspondence with the battles for Bakhmut in spring 2023 and Avdiivka last autumn.
Counting the graves
Volunteers working with the BBC and Mediazona have counted new military graves in 70 cemeteries across Russia since the war began. As satellite images show, the cemeteries have been expanded significantly. For example, images of the Bogorodskoye cemetery in Ryazan, southeast of Moscow, show that a completely new section has appeared. Photos and videos taken on the ground suggest that most of these new graves belong to soldiers and officers killed in Ukraine.
Tags: meat grinder strategy BBC reconstructs Moscows losses war Ukraine cost lives soldiers
