A unit within the Russian army participating in the front-line battles in Ukraine has come to be called the "Bermudskij treugolnik" – the Bermuda Triangle, according to a report from the independent Russian media outlet Bereg. Most soldiers who have been placed in it have been killed or gone missing.
30-year-old Igor Anistratenko voluntarily enlisted at the beginning of 2023 and had only been part of this unit for a few weeks when he was listed as missing. In April this year, more than a year later, a military investigator called and told that they had found a "skeleton with glasses" that bore Anistratenko's identity tag, his stepmother Svetlana told Bereg a few weeks ago.
Reports emerging from the battles reinforce the image of a "meat grinder" where the Russian army is trying to wear down Ukraine's defense by driving wave after wave of storming soldiers.
As Ukraine has raised the stakes in the war by invading Russia – and Russia is responding by continuing to bet on a major breakthrough in eastern Ukraine – death tolls are being reported that are among the highest so far.
Secret and difficult to calculate
Ukraine and its allies claim that the Russian invasion forces have lost an average of one thousand soldiers per day over the past few weeks, but this difficult-to-control figure includes both killed soldiers and a larger proportion of wounded who have been taken out of combat.
Russia does not speak about how many soldiers have fallen, but independent investigations are being conducted to determine at least approximately how many there are. It is definitely more than 66,000, as independent Mediazona and the British BBC have been able to confirm that many individual deaths.
Last summer, most assessors and calculation models agreed that the total Russian death toll had exceeded 100,000 and could approach 150,000.
Already then, in July, it was calculated that the Russian death toll would rapidly increase to between 200 to 250 soldiers per day. It was a few weeks before Ukraine launched a counter-invasion of Russian Kursk.
Need to call in more
Over the past few weeks, unusually extensive recruitment campaigns have been launched on Russian platforms and in propaganda channels to attract more volunteers to take lucrative contracts. This comes after reports that this type of recruitment has not gone as well as the Kremlin has claimed.
President Vladimir Putin may face a decision on a new and unpopular mobilization on a larger scale. From the fall, Russians will be able to be called up through a new digital system, and it will become much harder to avoid a call-up order.
The rulers in Russia are keeping quiet about the death toll on the Russian side in the war, but attempts are being made to calculate how large it is. Since last summer, all independent assessments have made it clear that the death toll has exceeded 100,000.
66,400 Russian soldiers' deaths have been confirmed as of the last August, according to an ongoing review by the independent Russian media outlet Mediazona in collaboration with the British BBC. There, they have counted deaths proven with the help of graves, runes, relatives, insurance information, or news articles.
Estimated, there were around 120,000 Russians who had fallen in the summer, possibly up to 140,000, according to a calculation model developed by Mediazona and Meduza, which is based on registered inheritance cases.
These calculations do not include fighters from the self-proclaimed so-called people's republics in eastern Ukraine.
According to a leaked estimate from the US Department of Defense, there are three to four seriously injured Russian soldiers for every death, which could mean that the Russian forces have been decimated by around half a million men or more during the war.
Sources: Mediazona, BBC, Meduza, The Economist
