At least 8,000 Russian "volunteers" likely died in Ukraine – Russian media

At least 8,000 Russian "volunteers", including recruits, may have died in the war against Ukraine.

Source: Russian investigative project Vazhnie Istorii (Important Stories) with reference to the data of the pension fund and the register of disabled people

Details: The journalists tried to count the number of the Russian "volunteers", who were only equated to the status of contractors in November, relying on the open data about the survivor’s pensions payments.

According to the information of the pensions fund, as of 1 January 2023, 1,430 persons received the survivor’s pensions. It is a lot more than before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Vazhnie Istorii counted that almost 9,000 likely receive pension from the pension fund in connection with the death of their family members in Ukraine.

Yet, such increased growth can also be connected with the fact that people from the occupied territories of Ukraine started to receive pension. At the same time, an anonymous source of the project reports that few people have managed to apply for this pension.

The Russian Federal State Statistics Service reports that one deceased breadwinner equals 1.1 receivers of the pension in Russian families.

Thus, almost 9,000 survivor’s pension receivers may be evidence of 8,000 deceased volunteer soldiers.

Vazhnie Istorii stresses that the real number of deceased "volunteers" can be a lot higher, since only the data about the people who were able to go through all bureaucratic institutions in order to apply for the pension were added to statistics.

In addition to this, the data of the Russian disabled people register was analysed for the project. It was discovered that in July 2022, the number of disabled war veterans increased drastically for the first time in the last few years.

Specifically, from the beginning of the full-scale Russian war against Ukraine in February 2022 to February 2023, over 3,000 people managed to apply for the status of a disabled war veteran – these were only those who went through the bureaucratic process. 

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