Russia says little about its soldiers dying, so an open-source team is trying to keep track

For months, Vitaly Votanovsky has been walking through rows of newly excavated graves in Russia’s far-southern Krasnodar region, filming and photographing evidence of the country’s growing number of military deaths, which the Kremlin accuses of trying to hide.

The pictures, which Votanovsky posted to his Telegram channel, show several graves lined with plots to honor what Russia calls fallen heroes.

Many mounds are decorated with large bouquets of flowers, portraits of soldiers and regimental flags.

Others are marked only by wooden crosses sticking out of the dirt, with no names.

What angered Votanovsky the most was the grave where the soldier was killed, only 19 or 20, hardly older than his daughter.

“They are healthy people who are old enough to give birth to children who can benefit the country, build houses, factories and raise children.”

“He ends up on the ground now.”

Count the dead

The former air force officer-turned-activist is part of a small network of volunteers and journalists working to document Russia’s war dead by visiting graves, talking to family members and scanning social media and news publications for obituaries.

They tried to quantify the death toll that Ukrainian and Western officials had estimated but Russia rarely acknowledged.

In September, as it announced “partial mobilization,” the Russian Ministry of Defense says that less than 6,000 soldiers have died since Feb 24, 2022.

In December, the adviser to the president of Ukraine, approximately 13,000 soldiers died.

Russia has not provided a more recent update, but last month British officials estimated that around 200,000 Russian fighters had been wounded or killed in Ukraine since the war began.

Even before the war, Russia has classified military deaths as state secrets.

After launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, he imposed increasingly restrictive censorship laws.

Votanovsky had previously been detained and told CBC news he was under criminal investigation. He received a picture of a grave with his photo on it, but he said the death threat didn’t stop him. He continued his activism in Russia, but others worked from safer environments abroad.

That’s an underestimate

A team of journalists from independent media outlets Mediazonetogether with journalists from the BBC’s Russian service and volunteer help, has created a database and confirmed more than 15,000 Russian military deaths since the war began.

“We believe the real number is two or three times higher,” said data journalist Maxim Litavrin in an interview with CBC news from Riga, Latvia.

Litavrin said he believes the number is higher because it only counts deaths that can be confirmed through online open source information.

The count does not include the missing, nor does it include some of the graves that Vontanovsky photographed, as the team was unable to find any additional details.

Votanovsky said that he has recorded 700 graves in the Krasnodar region, and about 40 percent of them are not part of the number of journalists.

Some graves are for fighters with Russia Wagner Group, which Votanovsky first took photos at the end of December.

He saw a truck delivering bodies to the site and a worker told him the bodies were from Rostov-on-Don, a city in southern Russia near the border.

When a Reuters reporter visited the site on January, they witnessed security cameras and fences being installed.

Wagner was recruited thousands of prisoners from Russian prisons for the war in Ukraine, and many were thrown into the deadly battlegrounds around the eastern city of Bakhmut.

For months, Russia has been sending more men and weapons to attack Bakhmut and this is one of the reasons why Litavrin said his team has recently noticed an increase in the death toll.

There were so many obituaries and social media posts that they had to recruit additional volunteers to help.

Journalists posted an infographic to help illustrate some of the findings, such as the fact that 121 Russian pilots were killed in Ukraine, and nearly 200 officers with the rank of lieutenant colonel and above.

However, it is not releasing the soldier’s name at this time.

“We believe it’s a Russian invasion illegal and cruel, but we are not ready to reveal the name of the soldier,” he said.

“We don’t think that’s right now. We’ll have to do it when the war is over.”

Despite the growing number of deaths, Litavrin did not think the number was enough to shake public opinion about the war in Russia.

He said “Russian Propaganda has been used” and in most of the social media posts he read, people were not angry, but saw death as a necessity and part of a larger war.

In November, a poll conducted by the Levada Center, an independent Russian public opinion firm, found that 75 percent of the respondents support Russian military action in Ukraine.

The fact that the number did not decrease, due to the increasing number of deaths, made Carina Pronina disappointed.

He was a journalist with the Russian news magazine “People of Baikal” and was forced to leave the country at the end of January after being told that the police would come to his home.

He told CBC News that he was previously arrested at a cemetery in Buryatia, while reporting on the number of military deaths in the eastern Siberian region.

“I think from the beginning there was a sense that the death toll, which was going to increase, was going to cause a public reaction,” he told CBC news via Zoom video interview.

“The number of coffins doesn’t seem to have any effect.”

‘proof of time’

He believes that if anything, the mobilization campaign can increase Russian patriotism and foster a sense of belonging because those who have lost a son, husband or father want to be celebrated together as heroes.

In the two regions where he is focused, Buryatia and Irkutsk, he and his team have confirmed 700 deaths and they will continue to do the work even though they are all out of the country.

“We have to have some figures – certain people who died,” he said.

“It’s all the evidence of the times.”

As for the database, Litavrin said it could be transferred to researchers after the war. He said even if the government changes, he doubts the correct tally will be released.