Over the past 10 months, Russian losses in the war with Ukraine have been growing faster than any time since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022, BBC analysis suggests.
As peace efforts intensified in 2025 under pressure from US President Donald Trump's administration, 40% more obituaries of soldiers were published in Russian sources compared with the previous year.
Overall, the BBC has confirmed the names of almost 160,000 people killed fighting on Russia's side in Ukraine.
BBC News Russian has been counting Russian war losses together with independent outlet Mediazona and a group of volunteers since February 2022. We keep a list of named individuals whose deaths we were able to confirm using official reports, newspapers, social media, and new memorials and graves.
The real death toll is believed to be much higher, and military experts we have consulted believe our analysis of cemeteries, war memorials and obituaries might represent 45-65% of the total.
That would put the number of Russian deaths at between 243,000 and 352,000.
Read the rest here.
6 comments:
The problem is that no one in Russia cares:
Not Putin (Now, his second or third dacha is another matter),
Not the serfs.
And the Canonical Church is still persecuted: see https://orthochristian.com/174901.html, even when court demies accusationsCOURT: UKRAINOPHOBIA ACCUSATIONS AGAINST UOC’S METROPOLITAN THEODOSY ARE COMPLETELY BASELESS
I have posted the above comment. However, I think it important to note that the linked website is effectively under the control of the Russian Church. And the ROC has become a religious propaganda arm of the Putin dictatorship. As I have noted on multiple occasions, when you invade a neighboring country, wage deliberate war on the civilian population and perpetrate all manner of murderous war crimes, it is not reasonable to expect the victims of this aggression to treat your state church as anything other than an enemy Fifth Column. Church canons are not a suicide pact.
Dear John,
You did publish my comment but you imply that it is -somehow- Russian propaganda.
The Ukrainian soldiers from the Canonical church who fight and die in the Ukrainian army,
fighting against the Russian invaders, are they also serving the Russian propaganda?
The pan-Orthodox group, with members of OCA, ROCOR, Antiochian Archdiocese, Serbian Church, Greek Archdiocese hierarchs who met with a congressman about the persecution of the canonical Ukrainian canonical Church, are they Russian agents? They were accused of being so by Archons of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, they also accused the canonical Church of Ukraine to persecute the schismatic Church created by Contantinople turning the victims into persecutors (sic!).
His Eminence Epidophoros, of the Ecumenical Patriarchate made a statement denying the accusations of the Archons and declared that people mentioned by them were not Russian agents.
The United Nations, the World Council of Churches, the Vatican, and all the other organizations mentioning the persecution of the canonical Ukrainian Church do you think they are Russian lobbyists too?
We seem to be back to Soviet times when some people in the West denied the cruel persecution of the Orthodox Church and when the Soviets pretended that this was but American or Western propaganda.
It is one’s duty to defend the Ukrainian canonical Church because of the real persecution happening in Ukraine (Bishops, priests and faithful molested, churches raided and seized).
This has nothing to do with Russia: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Metropolitan Onuphrius left the Russian Church because of the invasion, Ukrainian authorities pretend the opposite, because they want the canonical Church to join the schism crested by Patriarch Bartholomew.
A Russian government using Russians as cannon fodder, yet again. The more things changed…
The root cause of silly, tragic arguments regarding canonicity Is the imperial structure and purpose of the Imperial churches, whether they are called catholic in the west, orthodox in the east, anglican in England In the form of British empire, etc. From a purely spiritual standpoint, the church always loses when it gets into bed with the state. From a purely practical perspective, however, the reason there are so many Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, and for that matter Muslims are because of their respective states enforced religion At the point of sword/gun throughout their histories. The church was a Department of state in holy Russia, too. Same under the great church of the Byzantines and Romans. A religion that Claims universality well at the same time aligning itself with a state, and a culture is not serious about being universal, almost by definition.
It is easy to be outspoken when one does not tell the whole truth (Rabindranath TAGORE)
GREEK MEDIA CALLS OUT CHURCH LEADERS’ SILENCE ON UKRAINIAN CHURCH PERSECUTION
see: https://orthochristian.com/175248.html
Greece, January 21, 2026
Greek Orthodox news site Vima Orthodoxias published a commentary on January 19 highlighting the “deafening” silence of Orthodox Church leaders regarding the persecution of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church under His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry of Kiev and All Ukraine.
The article, entitled states: “This is a crisis that concerns not only Ukraine, but the entire Orthodox world—and the silence of many primates is becoming deafening.”
The article also includes links to several resources concerning the persecution of the Church...
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