Fri 2025-Mar-21

Ukraine War: 900k Russian Dead

Tagged: MathInTheNews / Politics / Sadness / Statistics

Today the Russian deaths in Ukraine ticked over another milestone on their way to a million, passing 900,000 dead.

Really? 900,000 Russian Dead?

I find it difficult to sympathize with Russian leaders, but the soldiers are another matter. As we’ve written previously ^[1] ^[2] ^[3] ^[4] ^[5] ^[6] ^[7] ^[8] ^[9] ^[10] ^[11] ^[12], the casualties just seem unending – and Russian solders deserve some sympathy.

But… 900,000 dead? Really?

Really:

It appears Russians have passed the milestone of 900,000 dead, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence. (Again, and again: before you tell me that’s Ukrainian propaganda, have a look through the references for what I’ve written about this before. The Ukrainian MoD seems to be pretty middle-of-the-pack on Russian casualties.)

The previous milestone was 800,000 on 2025-Jan-08. That was just about 2.5 months ago, so Russian casualties are currently running at 40,000 dead per month. Every month.

Their devotion to the service of Moloch is truly impressive… in a very, very bad way. Revisiting our previous calculation at 700k deaths (see references there):

Overall population of Russia: 144,534,651
Male population of Russia: 144,534,651 / 2 = 72,267,325
Russian males of military service age: 0.3473 * 72,267,325 = 25,098,442
So casualties thus far amount to: 100% * 900,800 / 25,098,442 = 3.59%

So Russia has engaged in massive human sacrifice of between 3% to 4% of all its males of military service age!

Bertrand Russel is often misquoted as saying: “The mark of a civilized man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep.” (The truth is, he said things like that, but not those exact words.)

I can barely conceive of anyone so uncivilized as to think of the amount of death here, and do anything but weep.

Comparison Against Our Casualty Rate Model

Once again, it is our sad duty to check in with the regression model of Russian casualties that we built on the first 116 days of the war.

Shown here is the plot of casualties (vertical axis) versus time in days since start of the war (horizontal axis).
In the lower left you see the first 116 days of casualties, up to 200,000 dead in blue points.
The regression fit is the dashed line, while the 95% confidence limits and prediction limits are shown in gray bands around it. (If you don’t quite grasp what those mean, the practical import is that the regression model is very good and provides relatively tight predictions.)
In the upper right you see in red dots the more recent data (450k, 500k, 600k, 700k, 800k, and now 900k dead) plotted against the model trained on the data with less than 200k dead.
- The practical import of that is we can compare casualty rates now versus those at the beginning of the war.
- The red dots are:
  - Above the trend line,
  - Statistically significantly above it (outside the gray bands), and
  - Appear to be accelerating.