Utopia Talk / Politics / These leaks must end!

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Tue Feb 24 18:35:42 Embarrassing! https://en.zona.media/article/2026/02/24/mapofwar Four years of war. 200,000 confirmed dead and the geography of Russian losses in the war with Ukraine Today marks exactly four years since the start of the full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, and the true scale of the bloodshed is only now coming into focus. Since the early months of the largest armed conflict in recent European history, Mediazona, the BBC Russian Service, and a team of volunteers have maintained an independent count of Russian army losses. On this anniversary, our list of verified deaths has reached a grim milestone: 200,000 names, with 23,000 fatalities added in just the last ten days—a jump made possible only by a leak of Russian state data. Throughout the war, the Russian state has made a concerted effort to conceal its losses, but in Russia, almost any information collected by the government eventually leaks. Military data is no exception. Over the past four years, we have gathered hundreds of thousands of names from unit rosters leaked by deserters, Ukrainian intelligence publications, and endless social media posts from desperate relatives searching for missing soldiers. Yet, without definitive secondary confirmation, we could not add these names to our verified list. Tens of thousands of obituaries sat in our backlog, waiting to be processed and verified. The breakthrough came via Manticore, one of Russia’s many illicit background check (or probiv) services. Manticore managed to obtain a massive data dump from the Russian Civil Registry (ZAGS), the state body responsible for issuing birth, marriage, and death certificates. We requested that Manticore export all death certificates that explicitly listed Ukraine, or the Russian border regions of Kursk, Bryansk, and Belgorod, as the place of death. Cross-referencing this official registry leak with our existing backlog provided the definitive proof we needed. Simply by matching names to the ZAGS records, we were able to independently verify 23,000 new fatalities. The leak, however, is not a complete picture. The database cuts off in early 2025, meaning casualties from the latter half of the year remain unaccounted for. Furthermore, roughly half of all death certificates omit the specific place of death entirely. Even with this new data, our figure of 200,000 remains a conservative floor, not a ceiling.

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