Russian authorities do not disclose the scale of their army's losses in Ukraine, but the deaths of ordinary Russians as a result of retaliatory Ukrainian strikes are reported regularly and quite accurately. At the same time, according to BBC calculations, less than 3% of the dead civilians are named in the reports of the Russian authorities. These deaths become part of the official narrative about the “crimes of the Kyiv regime” and an argument in favor of continuing the war.
Russians Maxim and Marina met in Ukraine during a trip to Odessa. The relationship started quickly, although Marina initially resisted: Maxim was six years younger than her. “But he was always a real man, a man of his word. He was also persistent, and my doubts quickly went away,” recalls Marina. They spent the next 13 years together. At first we rented an apartment in Belgorod, then we bought a plot in a quiet area and built a one-story house.
Maxim did not sit idle - he gradually bought small garages, connected them until he got a solid car service, which he headed. Marina worked as an accountant in a dental clinic. Marina remembers their life together like this: “We never fought. There were never any conflicts or quarrels. [The husband was] very kind, he was never in a bad mood. Always smiling, always positive. If I was upset, he always supported me and told me jokes. He always had a lot of ideas, thoughts and plans.” The couple dreamed of children, but for five long years Marina was unable to get pregnant. She went through several IVF protocols - and also to no avail. “I no longer had the strength to agree to another IVF, because all this is very difficult. We thought that that’s enough, we’ll live as we lived.” It was at this moment, in 2018, that their twins were born.
“Maxim was a very good father. Our relatives didn’t help us much; we did everything together. If he left for work, I could call at any moment and say: “That’s it, I can’t, I don’t have the strength anymore.” He dropped everything, came and helped. He was not the kind of father who came home, turned on the TV and poured a beer. On the contrary, I constantly communicated, walked, played with the children,” says Marina. The couple and their children did not discuss the war with Ukraine that began in 2022: “But they go to kindergarten - they already know that if there is a “racket”, they must run to that corner where there are no windows.” When asked if they discussed the war among themselves and whether Maxim was afraid of conscription, Marina replies that he was not afraid. “He was a real man,” she repeats. - I was ready. We had a lot of reports about the border being broken through - we are only 60 kilometers away - and he and his friends reasoned like this: “If they enter the city, we quickly take out the wives and children, and we [the men] stay until the end.”
For residents of Ukraine, by July 2025, air raids, missile strikes and drone attacks have long become part of everyday life. In June 2025 alone, the UN recorded at least 1,575 civilian deaths and injuries in Ukraine, the highest monthly total in three years. Russian missiles and long-range drones attacked cities in different parts of the country, including far from the front line. In Russia, the border Belgorod region took the brunt of the attack at that time - since 2022, it has been regularly subjected to shelling and attacks by Ukrainian drones. According to data provided by Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov in June 2025, in less than two years, 280 people were killed as a result of attacks in the region, and about 1.8 thousand were injured.
In Belgorod itself there were also relatively calm areas. “We are on the outskirts of the city, in the private sector, there are few drones here […]. We don’t have anything like that (enterprises that could be a target - BBC) nearby,” says Marina, explaining why they didn’t want to leave. On July 16, 2025, Marina and Maxim were having dinner in the house, the children were playing on the terrace - they were the first to hear something “buzzing.” Marina recalls that the appearance of the drone surprised her - it seemed huge to her, like an airplane: “It was shot down, it fell between two houses. The fence and trees caught fire, and everyone realized that they had to run to put it out.” Maxim and Marina ran out into the yard and managed to open the gate - at the very moment when the explosion was heard. “Maxim pushed me to the side, and he took a step back. I was sure that everything was fine with him,” Marina recalls. She was injured and remained conscious. When everything was quiet, she went to the gate. The husband was lying on the ground with his arms outstretched. There were wounded people lying on the street, someone was screaming, asking for help, but Marina could not move. In the darkness, she did not immediately notice: the fragment hit her husband in the carotid artery. The resuscitation team took a long time, Marina recalls. They said: if there is at least some hope, we will take him to the hospital. But there was no hope - Maxim died instantly. The six-year-old twins saw what was happening from inside the house. For a long time, Marina didn’t know how to explain to them what happened, so for some time she said: Dad is sleeping in the hospital.
The next morning, a routine message appeared in the telegram channel of Vyacheslav Gladkov, at that time the governor of the Belgorod region: “The city of Belgorod was attacked by an aircraft-type drone. A civilian died. Six people were injured. All victims were hospitalized in medical institutions. According to doctors, one of the victims is in serious condition. The rest received moderate to mild injuries. Seven private houses were damaged.”
“We are returning the war to where it came from,” said Vladimir Zelensky in early August 2026, commenting on Ukrainian attacks on an oil refinery and a military airfield in the Saratov region. About a month earlier, he had announced the start of a forty-day “influence operation,” a campaign of drone attacks on targets far from the front lines designed to encourage the Kremlin to end the war. Energy facilities, the military-industrial complex, transport logistics and warehouses of online retailers, primarily Wildberries, were under attack. As the attacks grew in intensity, so did civilian casualties, with each summer month breaking a new record for the number of fatalities. In August, at least 151 people died in Russia and annexed Crimea due to the war, according to Novaya Gazeta Europe's calculations. Until March 2026, with one exception, the monthly death toll did not exceed 40 people.
Unlike the losses of the Russian army, which journalists have to determine from bits of available information, the Russian authorities, at least in certain regions, report civilian losses relatively conscientiously. In the Belgorod region, where an independent count of civilian deaths is carried out by the publication Fonar, the discrepancies between the official figures and the list of journalists are small. But if the memory of Russian soldiers is perpetuated by order of the president - streets, squares, schools, school desks are named in their honor, their names appear on memorial plaques on houses and granite memorials, then reports of civilian losses remain largely impersonal. We analyzed the telegram channels of regional governors, operational headquarters and heads of municipalities in Russia and annexed Crimea from the beginning of the full-scale invasion until August 31, 2026 and calculated that the heads of Russian regions during this time reported 1,742 dead civilians - while only 92 of them were named. People who died as a result of the war going on in Ukraine are usually described as generally as possible: simply as a “civilian”, “man” or “woman”, without name, profession or other details.
As the overall death toll rises, so does the proportion named in official reports. While in 2022-2024 authorities named about 8% of civilians (40 out of 479 over three years) whose deaths were reported, in 2025 this proportion dropped to 2.4% (17 out of 698). In 2026, it increased to 6% (35 out of 538), but remained below the level of the first years of the war. The exception is people associated with government agencies or emergency services: officials, rescuers, employees of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, security forces and others killed in action are much more often (in about 30% of all cases named as dead during all the years of the war) called by name and almost always their position or profession is indicated. The authorities of the regions bordering Ukraine—those where the greatest number of deaths—are named most of all. In 22 of the 34 regions where civilian casualties were officially reported, authorities did not name anyone, even though there were relatively few fatalities there. The annexed Crimea (not counting Sevastopol) stands out, where the authorities did not name any of the 59 dead. Often, but not always, names were given after major attacks in which three or more people died.
Stories of death - where they exist - often take on a heroic character. In one surprising case, the governor of the Kursk region, Alexander Khinshtein, described how a five-year-old boy died as a result of a drone crash on the city beach on July 8, 2025, while trying to shield his mother. The child was posthumously awarded the regional badge “For fidelity to duty and courage.” His mother Polina Minashkina, in the first interview after the incident, described what happened differently - after the explosion, she herself covered her son with herself, and then tried to put out the clothes that caught fire on him. She received severe burns over half the surface of her body, was in critical condition on a ventilator for a long time and underwent numerous skin grafts. Polina refused an interview with the BBC, citing the fact that she was “tortured by haters” and she was tired of “dragging on this situation” and wanted to “live her grief quietly.” In another case, the death of 22-year-old Ilya Gukezhev, also in the Kursk region, who died on June 29, 2024, was widely covered. He reportedly helped remove a seriously injured little girl from the car, carried her into the house and tried to call an ambulance, but another drone strike killed both. A year later, Vladimir Putin posthumously awarded him the medal “For saving the dead.” According to open information, the president awarded at least 15 victims with state awards - medals “For saving the dead”, “For bravery”, and some - the Order of Courage. Most of them died rescuing or evacuating other people or performing work in the attack zone: among those awarded were volunteers, power engineers, a signalman, drivers and members of territorial self-defense. Unlike relatives of military personnel, Vladimir Putin has never met with the families of the victims, at least publicly.
If the state does not name the dead or talk about the victims of the war, journalists and human rights activists often take on this work: they check the circumstances of the death, ask relatives to share their memories and try to preserve the memory of each person. During the Chechen wars, such work was systematically carried out by the human rights center “Memorial”: the state did not then keep records of the dead civilians of Chechnya, and after the first war even the State Statistics Committee turned to human rights activists for assessments. But by the current war, there were almost no organizations left capable of doing this systematically throughout the country. Memorial stopped its work in Russia after they were declared an undesirable, extremist and banned organization and a “foreign agent” earlier this year. Much independent journalism was driven out of the country soon after the war began. On state federal television, large attacks with a large number of victims are widely covered - but mainly in the context of accusations of “terrorism” against Ukraine. On May 12, 2024, for example, during the attack on Belgorod, which killed 17 people, the “Results of the Week” program on NTV talked about a “hate crime.” Although the Russian Ministry of Defense itself assured then that the residential building was damaged by fragments of a downed air defense missile, and not as a result of a targeted attack (independent OSINT analysts also questioned this version, suggesting that the house was most likely hit by either an air defense missile or an aerial bomb fired by Russia by mistake. The Ukrainian authorities did not comment on this). Strikes against Russia in response to the invasion of Ukraine are presented on television as an argument in favor of continuing the war. The same program on NTV said that the shelling could be stopped only by “creating a buffer zone” - that is, continuing the offensive at the front. Moreover, if in May 2024 Belgorod did not leave the television screens - in two days (May 12 and 13), Channel One, Rossiya 1 and NTV released 64 stories, and Channel One in its releases called the dead by name and listed their professions, then two years later the dead Russians turn into numbers. In more than 110 stories and fragments of talk shows on Channel One, Rossiya 1, Rossiya 24 and NTV about the attacks in Kotovsk (seven people died), Gelendzhik (eight people) and Nizhnekamsk (13 people), not a single name of the deceased was mentioned. About the seven night shift employees at the Wilderries warehouse in Kotovsk on July 19, Rossiya 24 said only that they were “four men and three women aged from 20 to 58 years.” The most personal thing that was told about those killed on the beach in Arkhipo-Osipovka near Gelendzhik concerned a nine-year-old boy from Moscow: he came to the sea with his grandparents and younger brother just two days before the strike. When reporting on the strike in Nizhnekamsk, state channels reported the death of a five-year-old girl who was sleeping on the balcony, but did not name her. Vremya reported about the attacks on Kotovsk and Gelendzhik only at the 8th and 16th minutes of its releases. The story about the attack on Nizhnekamsk, where 13 people were killed, came out third in the issue. Pro-war telegram channels, which talk about events at the front often more honestly and critically than officials and federal media, say the same thing about the dead as state television channels. In their posts on the day of the attacks on Kotovsk, Gelendzhik and Nizhnekamsk, we did not find a single name of the deceased. "One possible explanation is that the victims themselves are not the main focus of this narrative," Oivo and Väistö told the BBC. “Our results show that in Russian television coverage, civilian victims often appear less as individuals and more as evidence of enemy brutality. Their main function is to demonstrate what exactly the enemy did, not to tell who the dead were as people. In such a narrative, the category of the “innocent victim” may be more important than a detailed individual biography.”
