The BBC’s Russian service, working with the Russian investigative journalism website Mediazona (which appears on the register of “foreign agents”) and a team of volunteers who log data from open sources, has so far identified by name 266,032 Russian servicemen who lost their lives during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Analysis of the list shows that, in 2025 and 2026, the bodies of dead servicemen were recovered with considerable delay, on average only 150 days after they were killed on the battlefield. Their deaths were officially recorded even later, after an average of 236 days.

Over the past month, the names of 22,358 Russian servicemen who lost their lives have been added to the outlets’ database. This sharp rise is not directly linked to the situation at the front.

Most of the names added recently, 18,657 in total, are of dead soldiers who had long been listed as missing and whose bodies were found by recovery teams in 2025 and 2026. Some of these soldiers were killed as early as the fighting of 2022, but most died in 2025.