In 2025, Russian Courts Got More Missing/Deceased Requests Than All 2024

That requests in the first five months of 2025 from Russian citizens about missing male relatives or that they be declared deceased has already surpassed all of those filed in the entire year of 2024 suggests that Russian casualties in Ukraine are rising, that the war is not going well for Russia and that more and more Russians are aware of it. JL

Militarnyi reports:

Since the beginning of 2025, Russian courts have received over 26,000 applications to declare individuals missing or deceased — surpassing the total of 22,600 filed throughout 2024. The statistics do not include mobilized citizens from temporarily occupied areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. The leader in the number of cases is the Zhovtnevyi District Court in the Rostov region. March 2025 set a record for the number of the reports of missing Russian military personnel submitted to the Ukrainian project “I Want to Find.”

Since the beginning of 2025, Russian courts have received over 26,000 applications to declare individuals missing or deceased — surpassing the total of 22,600 filed throughout 2024.

The publication Mediazona reported on this.

The majority of these applications conceal information about the applicants. Since the beginning of 2024, approximately 19,000 such cases with classified data have been accumulated.

 

The leader in the number of cases is the Zhovtnevyi District Court in the Rostov region — since the beginning of last year, 2,700 applications have been filed there, all with restricted access to information.

Russian artillerymen. Photo: Russian media

The court has confirmed that the applications had been submitted by the representatives of military units based in the region.

According to estimates, approximately 12,000 applications involve the commanders of specific units, while another 9,000 pertain to other branches of the Russian Ministry of Defense. Overall, at least 23,500 cases are directly linked to military personnel.

As of June 2025, the publication estimates that the total number of applications concerning missing or deceased military personnel ranges between 30,000 and 40,000.

 

Russian Losses

According to the Goryushko project, which analyzes all available obituaries online, Russian military casualties since February 24, 2022, amount to approximately 113,000 servicemen.

This statistics does not include mobilized citizens from temporarily occupied areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the servicemen of the so-called 1st Donetsk and 2nd Luhansk Army Corps, individuals who died in the rear or from wounds sustained, as well as foreign mercenaries.

Funeral of a Russian soldier. Photo: Radio Liberty

It is also known that March 2025 set a record for the number of the reports of missing Russian military personnel submitted to the Ukrainian project “I Want to Find.”

At that time, over 320 new reports of missing invaders were recorded daily, with a total of 10,027 submissions for the month.

Additionally, on May 15, it was reported that since the beginning of the full-scale Russian-Ukrainian war, Russian forces had lost at least 6,000 officers of various ranks.