Information on Russian Combat Losses in Ukraine More Available and Reliable than That about Deteriorating Demographic Situation at Home, Raksha Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 27 – It is commonly assumed that the Kremlin’s decision to restrict or even block entirely large swaths of demographic statistics has been driven by the desire of the Russian leadership to hide the number of deaths and wounded among Russians involved in Putin’s expanded war in Ukraine.

            But if that is so, independent demographer Aleksey Raksha says, the Kremlin’s approach has failed because journalists both Russian and foreign have found ways to come up with data on combat losses using other sources than government statistics. As a result, such information is now more readily available than is data on other demographic issues in Russia (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2025/12/27/territoriia-bez-dannykh).

            This in turn suggests two things, he and other independent demographers say. On the one hand, it means that the demographic decline of Russia is now so serious that the regime is only too willing to use the war as an excuse to stop publishing data not just about it but about births, life expectancy and other measures.

            And on the other, they suggest, restricting the release of data means that the state itself is decaying because even if senior people have access to secret data, they often don’t know how to interpret it without the advice of experts and thus make ever more policy mistakes, exacerbating the problems Russia faces rather than solving them.

            Unfortunately, while the number of analysts focusing on Russian combat losses is large and their data are generally recognized as accurate – all experts rely on them – the number of analysts examining Russia’s broader demographic problems is much smaller – and so information about them is less widely available.