The number of Russian soldiers killed in the war since the start of the Russian aggression against Ukraine remains a secret that the Kremlin goes to great lengths to keep under wraps. As Voice of America correspondent Ricardo Marquina reports, Russian open source research shows that Moscow’s losses have been heavy.
Officials in occupied Crimea are holding a funeral ceremony for a soldier killed in the war.
Ceremonies like this, as well as public records from local media on death notices, serve as sources for data collection by independent organizations, such as Russian opposition media Mediazona. The data collected from these sources speak of about 50,000 Russian soldiers killed in combat.
Their research was based on open data, hoping to shed light on facts that the Kremlin keeps hidden, at least from sources it can control.
VOA spoke with Mr. Arno Reuser, open source discovery consultant.
“Open sources that are very difficult to be influenced by any state should be taken into account. The new cemetery is something you cannot deny. Satellite images of new cemeteries that didn’t exist a year ago are an objective source,” he says.
Some observers believe that the figures obtained from this research are much smaller than the real ones. They say that Russian society no longer uses social networks to speak freely as it did a decade ago about political or military issues. Access to information is much more limited now than it was in 2014.
“People were more open ten years ago. There were far fewer of those who kept their pages closed and inaccessible to outsiders. Practically, it was possible to learn everything about someone’s life,” Russian analyst Pavel Luzin with Tufts University tells VOA.
Ukraine has published the official figure of soldiers killed in the war. But some have questions. In February, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since the start of the Russian aggression. This figure has not been verified.
Russia’s tactics have been heavily criticized. Despite mounting evidence of high casualties, critics see no signs that Moscow will change its way of fighting.
“The Russian attack tactic is to send soldiers to the front line, a tactic that Russia considers valid. If they send more troops than Ukraine has bullets, then they will win,” Keir Giles with the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, also known as Chatham House, tells VOA.
Russia is showing no sign of clearing the fog of misinformation about its losses in the war, or about the reality its soldiers face on the battlefields of Ukraine.