Mortality of Russian military personnel in Ukraine
- Alexey Bessudnov
- Associate Professor at the University of Exeter
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The risk of dying in the war in Ukraine is higher for residents of some ethnic minorities than for Russians. Sometimes next time. However, while the majority of the dead among the population are Russians, the higher risk for a minority is more the result of inequality between regions, and not a resonant policy of the UN.
“In Tuva, the heart of a mother could not stand it after the news that her son died in the war with Ukraine! Four children were left without a father and grandmother. channel “New Tuva”. In the 20,000-strong city of Kyakhta in Buryatia, according to a local publication, already 45 dead in Ukraine. Human rights activists often say: “Russia is killing the Buryats, and Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are saving them.” Mass protests against mobilization have recently taken place in Dagestan.
If you read the media, you might get the impression that Russia will be watching the front of a mostly national minority. According to some estimates, recruitment to the army (both contract soldiers and mobilized) is higher in some national republics (Buryatia, Tyva, Dagestan, Chechnya) than in the natural regions of Russia. But are the offenders really from among the representatives of the highest degree in the army fighting in Russia?
We resolved this issue by analyzing the list of names* of losses of Russian military personnel in Ukraine, the BBC composite, Mediazona (the publication is recognized in Russia as a “media-foreign agent”) and a team of volunteers.
Distribution of the number of deaths by regions of Russia
As of October 21, the five regions with the highest death toll are Krasnodar Krai (332), Dagestan (321), Buryatia (305), Bashkortostan (258) and Volgograd Oblast (230). With the smallest – Karachay-Cherkessia (19), Yamal-Nenets Autonomous District (10), Magadan Region (7), Nenets Autonomous District (4) and Chukotka Autonomous District (2). Data for these and other regions is presented on the map, which also shows casualties by region per 10,000 males aged 22 to 37.
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As can be seen from the regions with a massive death toll, there really is a republic (Dagestan, Buryatia, Bashkortostan). However, the size of the population varies according to different categories of the population.
The share of deaths per capita by regions of Russia
To calculate the number of deaths per capita, we used data from the 2010 All-Russian Census. Among the dead in Ukraine among predominantly young men. Therefore, we usually use men aged 10 to 25 years old in 2010 – in 2022 this cohort was 22 to 37 years old.
The two regions with the highest death tolls are Buryatia (mortality rate: 28.4 deaths per 10,000 young men) and Tuva (27.7). They are followed by the Pskov region (17.1), North Ossetia (16.8), the Republic of Altai (16.3). In Dagestan, the mortality rate is 7.6, in Chechnya – 7.1, in Ingushetia – 6.4. (However, it should be accepted that for Chechnya and, possibly, other republics of the North Caucasus, this estimate may be underestimated due to incomplete data.)
The lowest mortality rate is in the Moscow region (1.7), Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug (1.7), Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug (1.7), St. Petersburg 1.4) and Moscow (0.3). Thus, the risk of dying in the war in Ukraine for young men from Buryatia and Tyva is about 100 times the same as for young Muscovites.
Percentage of deaths and relative risk of death among ethnic groups
Calculating the proportion of deaths by region does not significantly reduce mortality among foreign groups. The share of national national groups is rewarded by national republics. For example, in Buryatia among young men there are about 60% Russians, in Tyva the share of Russians is about 10%, and in Chechnya and Ingushetia – less than 1%.
Volunteer-collected data does not include an ethnic record of the dead. However, for some food groups, we may use the first and last name as a marker of ethnicity. To encode ethnicity based on first and last name, we used a previously common machine learning algorithm (Bessudnov and others 2021). This algorithm has a number of limitations. It does not work for some ethnic groups with Russified names (such as, for example, Chuvash or Komi). Also, ethnicity is not limited to having a colored name, so the algorithm can only be used for rough statistical estimates.
In Table 1 (see below), we calculate mortality rates for aggregated economic groups. Based only on information about the name and the impossibility of separating the names of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians (many Ukrainians have surnames of immigrants, and Russians have Ukrainian surnames). We also collected the Bashkirs and Tatars and (in a separate group) the peoples of the North Caucasus into one group.
There are four columns in the table: the number of deaths by aggregated ethnic groups, the share of groups among the dead in Ukraine, the share of ethnic groups in the Russian population (among men aged 10-25 according to the 2010 census) and the quotient of dividing the two indicators (relative risk ).
Relative risk shows how many times the proportion of an ethnic group is among the highest proportion of its proportion in the male population. The composition of this religious group is more among the dead than in the male population.
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As follows from the table, most of the dead were killed in Ukraine, but their proportion among the dead is slightly less than the proportion of Russians in the male population of Russia. On the contrary, among the Buryats and Tuvans, the share among the dead is 5 times higher than their share in the population of the country. For the Bashkirs, Tatars and peoples of the North Caucasus, the proportion of those killed is higher than the proportion in the population of the country by about 20%.
Ethnic disparity in risk of death
Another way to assess ethnicity in the probability of death of the population in Ukraine is to compare the proportion of dead Russians and representatives of national minorities in the national republics. Table 2 shows these data.
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In this table, we compare the proportion of non-Slavic names among the dead and the proportion of the non-Slavic population in the population of the republic’s population. A higher risk relative risk means a higher risk for a minority of deaths in Ukraine – compared to Russian men from the same national republics.
It was revealed that ethnic inequality in exceptional cases among local residents is lower than in Russia as a whole. For example, in Russia as a whole, the risk of death in Ukraine for Buryats exceeds the risk of death for Russians by about 5 times (500%). In Buryatia, the risk for Buryats exceeds the risk for Russians by only 23%.
In almost all national republics, the relative risk value is close to one, which means that within the republics, the high probability of death for Russians and prestigious ethnic groups is negligible (and may well be due to the imperfection of the method of determining ethnicity based on the name).
Ethnic inequality as territorial inequality
Thus, some indicators of the minority (especially the Buryats and Tuvans) are indeed a much larger proportion of the military killed in Ukraine than their share in the population. To a lesser extent, this applies to other ethnic groups, such as the Tatars and Bashkirs, as well as the peoples of the North Caucasus.
However, the majority of those who died in Ukraine are Russians, and their proportion among the dead is approximately equal to the proportion in the population of Russia.
In the case of the Buryats and Tuvans, the higher mortality rate seems to reflect a higher set of contracts in the socio-economic sphere, less prosperous regions of Eastern Siberia and the Far East.
Among the regions with a higher mortality rate are not only Buryatia and Tuva, but also the Republic of Altai, the Trans-Baikal Territory, the Jewish Autonomous Region, and the Sakhalin Region. In the more economically successful national republics (Yakutia, Tatarstan), military service is a less attractive career trajectory for young men and, accordingly, the number of servicemen killed per capita is significantly lower. In Buryatia, the vast majority of the population has a high ethnicity, the death rate of Buryat military is higher than for Russians, by about 20-25%.
Most likely, ethnic inequality is a consequence of territorial inequality. This feature is characteristic not only for the Russian army, which is now fighting in Ukraine. In the US Army during the Korean, Vietnam and Iraq Wars more likely military personnel from poor states and the armed forces died (they were more likely to serve in the army), and Hispanic Americans perished in Iraq more often than whites or African Americans.
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* As of October 21, the reports on the list of losses of the Russian military in Ukraine contain information about 7,871 losses, open from sources (mainly from social networks – about deaths from family members of the victims, elected organizations, government officials). Records of the discovered name and family of other victims, as well as data – date of birth, death, branch of service, rank, etc., as well as the region. The region was indicated in which the authorities first discovered (in the case of an official report), or the region in which the family of the deceased lived.
This data is incomplete and does not include all servicemen who died in Ukraine. There are no people whose deaths were not reported, as well as missing people. The vast majority of those who ended up in the base are contract soldiers who died during the first 8 months of hostilities (February – October). It seems that the degree of completeness is presented in regions with a high probability, for example, in the regions of the North Caucasus. However, in the face of an official database of statistics, a possible assessment of the characteristics of those killed in Ukraine.
Alexey Bessudnov, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social and Medical Sciences at the University of Exeter (UK), wrote this article specifically for the BBC Russian Service.