Russia’s military death toll in Ukraine has now passed the 50,000 mark - the BBC can confirm.
In the second 12 months on the front line - as Moscow pushed its so-called meat grinder strategy - we found the body count was nearly 25% higher than in the first year.
BBC Russian, independent media group Mediazona and volunteers have been counting deaths since February 2022.
New graves in cemeteries helped provide the names of many soldiers.
Our teams also combed through open-source information from official reports, newspapers and social media.
More than 27,300 Russian soldiers died in the second year of combat - according to our findings - a reflection of how territorial gains have come at a huge human cost.
Russia has declined to comment.
I swear he’s just trying to deal with overpopulation by slaughtering them.
Russia has like the exact opposite problem
Russia is far from overpopulated, they have only twice as many people as France. This war will most likely destroy a number of small villages, where most of their force is drafted from.
“We don’t care if some village is deserted”
“Welp! Our highly educated are leaving by the millions!”
They already had a problem because if you look by age group and sex they would have issues in future. They’re now creating and even bigger problem. An entire age group where there are hardly any men. Just check their population pyramid. Lack of young people. They’ll now have way less.