A town in Siberia unveiled a war memorial late last year. Beyond commemorating the fallen, It gives us a rare insight into the Ukrainian War.⬇️
This memorial is located in Birsk, a small city in Bashkortostan located on the Belaya River more or less between the cities of Ufa and Izhevsk, and was opened on September 10th, 2025. It commemorates post-WWII Soviet and Russian war dead from the city and surrounding district of Birsk, which has a collective population of approximately 63,000.
As of opening day the memorial featured three names from the Soviet-Afghan War, four names from Chechnya, and 188 names from the Ukrainian War, all listed with dates of birth and death. Bashkortostan has contributed a huge number of volunteers to the war effort and has, at least per publicly available data, suffered more casualties than any other Russian oblast - in fact more than the entire Moscow region despite having a fifth the population. Birsk has certainly contributed its share and suffered proportional losses. Critically, this is hard data on Russian casualties in Ukraine - curated by local citizens and geographically and temporally bounded. It's as good as it is possible to get.
First of all, a sanity check. The Soviet Army was staffed by conscription whose burden was spread fairly evenly among the Soviet population, and it suffered approximately 15,000 fatal casualties in Afghanistan. Per the 1989 Soviet census, Birsk and the surrounding district had a population of approximately 54,000 in a country of some 286 million, which should have produced 2.83 fatalities from the district in Afghanistan. The wall features 3 names from that conflict. All good.
The Russian Army of the 1990s was similarly staffed by conscription whose burden was spread somewhat less evenly among the Russian population, and it suffered approximately 10,000 fatal casualties in Chechnya. Per the 2002 Russian census the Russian Federation had a population of 145 million and Birsk and the surrounding district had a population of some 61,500 people. This should have produced 4.24 fatalities from the district in Chechnya. The wall features 4 names from that conflict. Checks out.
The Russian Army of the 2020s is staffed on a volunteer basis with a highly uneven recruitment base. This is not unique to Russian society, it's simply a factor of who joins a volunteer army and why - San Francisco suffered forty times fewer casualties per capita in the GWOT than some rural districts of California, for instance. Similar dynamics are in play in Russia - rural districts like Birsk see significantly higher recruitment than urban centers like Ufa, let alone metropolitan centers like Moscow and Saint Petersburg. As such to draw conclusions about overall Russian losses we need to properly account for this.
Mediazona runs a rather infamous casualty-tracking website that attempts to document Russian losses in Ukraine by name. I don't trust their data - otherwise I wouldn't be writing this lol - but I do think there's enough signal in their noise that their proportions can be relied upon for the purposes of this analysis. And of the approximately 9050 names Mediazona collected for Bashkortostan as of 10 September 2025, only 1900 are present from the major cities of the oblast - Ufa, Sterlitamak, Salavat, Beloretsk, and Neftekamsk, which collectively account for half the total population of the region, some two million people in total. The rest of the two million residents of Bashkortostan hail from rural or semi-rural districts like Birsk. Ergo, Mediazona is claiming that there are some 7150 personnel KIA from rural districts in that period.
(Mediazona had approximately 9700 names for Bashkortostan as of present and about 9050 as of 10 September 2025; I checked their regional database yesterday which showed about 2050 casualties from those cities and scaled it to their overall count as of 10 September 2025 at 94%)
Scaling off the 188 names in Birsk (pop. 63,000) to the entire rural oblast population of 2 million gives us an estimated rural KIA total of approximately 5,970 - 83% of Mediazona's claim of 7150 for that period. And bear in mind that this figure is both supportable by hard data collected by organizers and completely independent of the veracity or lack thereof of Mediazona's name list. Crudely scaled this would suggest the Russian Army has suffered approximately 190,000 KIA in Ukraine to date from Mediazona's claim of 225,000 KIA, although I suspect the actual number is quite a bit less than that because of "memorialization bias" - districts with heavy recruitment and thus heavy losses are logically going to be similarly quick to put up war memorials, in this case well before the end of combat.