Wed 2025-Dec-31

Ukraine War: 1,200,000 Russian Dead

Tagged: MathInTheNews / Politics / Sadness / Statistics

Let’s check in again on the sad state of affairs in Ukraine.

The Human Sacrifice Goes On… and On… and On…

Here on this Crummy Little Blog That Nobody Reads (CLBTNR), we’ve for some time been having… opinions about Ukraine. ^[1] ^[2] ^[3] ^[4] ^[5] ^[6] ^[7] ^[8] ^[9] ^[10] ^[11] ^[12] ^[13] ^[14] ^[15]

As we’ve been saying for a couple years now, we’re tracking the Russian casualty figures provided by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence:

We’ve been using the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence’s figures for Russian casualties. Of course, one could object that they are a biased source. But when we looked at other sources, they were kind of in the middle of the pack. Some sources were wildly inflated, while others had extremely hard to believe small numbers. (The latter were institutions that insisted on a very high standard of evidence, like geo-location, identities, photographs, and so on. This leads to a very severe under-count, so people usually take their estimates and apply a multiplier derived… somehow.) The Ukraine MoD says they count, every day. That might even be true. But they seem reasonably credible compared to others, and they are the ones on the spot. So we’ll take their figures.

Regrettably, it now appears the Russian casualty figures are above 1.2 million dead (and considerably more who are injured, many disabled for life):

(As you can see, the number of casualties is just a hair above 1.2 million on 2025-Dec-26. Judging by the rate, it would have hit 1.2 million on about 2025-Dec-24. I missed that – holiday preparations, you know. Since Musk has turned X/Twitter into a Nazi bar, I refuse to have an account there and can’t look back far enough to see. But this is close enough!)

The hole being blown in the middle of the Russian demographic of 18-44 year old males, i.e., those more or less qualified for military service, continues to be enlarged. By our reckoning:

\[144\ \mbox{million Russians} \times 0.5\ \mbox{males} \times 1/3\ \mbox{military age} = 24\ \mbox{million}\]

So 1.2 million dead is about $100\% \times 1.2\ \mbox{million} / 24\ \mbox{million} = 5\%$ of the military-age male population.

The Russian emigration and COVID-19 deaths (see previous post ^[15]: 900,000 men of military age emigrated and about 67,000 dead of COVID-19), we get about an extra million, for a total loss of 2.2 million. That’s $100\% \times 2.2\ \mbox{million} / 24\ \mbox{million}$, for a total loss about 9.17% of the Russian men of military service age.

These are men who will never return to work in the Russian economy. Their children will either grow up without fathers or not exist at all. Many women in the middle demographic of Russia will face the impossibility of finding husbands. This is the sort of thing that starts revolutions. (Though in the case of Russia, one never knows: they’ve tolerated worse in the past, when it comes to authoritarianism and mass deaths.)

As always, Bertrand Russell never quite said these exact words, but it’s right on the mark:

“The mark of a civilized man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep.” – often attributed to Bertrand Russell, who said things like this if not exactly this, but would in any case almost certainly agree with the sentiment

At the last Ukraine update on this CLBTNR, we said something that just encapsulates all the venom and malevolence of Russian, US, and Israeli governments, along with the rise of right-wing racist parties in Europe:

When we look at the deaths in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the deaths in Israel’s invasion of Gaza, the wholesale dismantling of public health in the US in favor of superstition, summary military executions of people in boats in the Caribbean, and masked men kidnapping people from the streets of the US with no due process at all… it is arguable that we can no longer claim to be civilized. We are, perhaps, just clever barbarians?

We have allowed right-wing populism turn us into vicious, superstitious, and venomously racist savages. And somehow we have done this on a planet-wide basis.

I wish that didn’t seem so accurate.

Comparison Against Our Casualty Rate Model

Here’s the updated plot, with all the depressing news:

Time is on the horizontal axis, for the first 1000 days of the Russian invasion.
Number of Russian soldiers reported dead by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence is on the vertical axis.
The blue points in the lower left are the initial training data, about 100ish days into the war. The resulting regression is the dotted line and the gray uncertainty intervals around it. Rather than rehash the $F$-statistic, let’s just say the linear fit is excellent.
The red points in the center to upper right are new data, collected approximately every 100,000 increment in casualties.

Note that the new data points are all well above the initial regression line. Sometime around day 450 (2024-Apr-10), the Russian death rate went up by about 43%, from about 700/day to about 1000/day. Either:

the Ukrainians got smarter or more efficient at killing Russians, or
the Russians started human wave attacks that made cheap sacrifice of their newly recruited troops.

(Or both, which is actually the most likely conclusion, to my mind.)

The data is practically screaming for a segmented regression model with a hinge function, which is unbearably fancy-pants language for “a line with a kink”. Perhaps next time I’ll do that, but I’m just too discouraged now.