Ali Cenk Çakıroğlu

Hi there. Dima Treschanin of Mediazona here. 1. We don’t consider our 2022–2023 data to be “broadly complete.” We do have non-public data that would add several thousand more people, including about a thousand from Wagner PMC alone. But our methodology is fairly conservative, and we don’t want to change it midstream. 2. According to our data so far, 2025 has been the deadliest year of the war. Although we have identified more than 100,000 people killed with dates of death in 2024, we know for certain that losses in 2025 were significantly higher. Collecting that data will take considerable time, though; it’s simply an enormous amount of work. 3. Thanks to non-public sources, we can see how long it takes the state to register deaths. For example, we’re currently working through a list in which most of the people were likely killed in the summer or early fall of 2025. Today we learned the dates of death for nine of them, and roughly the same number last week. To be clear: these people died last summer. Their obituaries, if they appear at all, will be published some time from now. 4. As for 2026, the situation is even worse: even government agencies (outside the MoD) don’t know how many people have been killed this year. And let’s be real, the MoD itself may not have the full picture either. 5. The more “static” the front line, the harder it is to recover bodies. The harder it is to recover bodies, the larger the share of soldiers listed as missing in action, and the longer and more difficult the identification process becomes. This also leads to more errors in which living people are declared dead; such cases are very rare, but they do happen. 6. Barring any major changes at the front, we expect that for the rest of this year and most of next, the new data we add will mainly concern 2025. 7. For this reason, we can’t say whether 2026 will prove deadlier than 2025. But there is no reason to believe the situation has improved in any way for the Russian army: broadly, the same tactics and strategy are being used as in 2025. That said, any claim of rising losses requires evidence, and we don’t have that evidence yet.