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Russia Quietly Erases Tens of Thousands of “Missing” Court Cases as War Losses Mount
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![Photo of Vlad Litnarovych]( "Photo of Vlad Litnarovych")
Russian regional court websites have begun quietly removing tens of thousands of case records related to people declared missing or deceased, a move that sharply limits one of the few remaining tools used to estimate Russia’s military losses in its war against Ukraine, according to an investigation by Russian outlet Mediazona on December 30.
Roughly 70,000 court case cards tied to missing-person claims have disappeared from public databases.
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Tracking such court filings has long been a key method for independent analysts and journalists to assess Russian battlefield casualties, particularly since official military loss figures remain classified and heavily censored.
Mediazona reports that over the past three years, 111,569 cases seeking legal recognition of a person as missing or dead were filed in Russian courts. Today, only 41,512 of those cases remain publicly accessible.
In 50 Russian regions, court websites now show zero missing-person lawsuits registered in 2025, a sudden and statistically implausible decline.
One of the most striking examples comes from the Oktyabrsky District Court in Russia’s Rostov region, previously the country’s single largest hub for such filings. From early 2024 onward, the court received 4,025 claims seeking recognition of individuals as missing. Court officials had openly acknowledged at the time that the surge was driven primarily by families of missing servicemen.
Now, the court’s website lists just 102 cases, all dating from mid-2025 onward.
Legal claims of this type are widely understood to reflect battlefield realities: families often pursue missing-person status to access benefits, pensions, or death certificates when soldiers fail to return from combat. For that reason, analysts consider the data one of the most reliable indirect indicators of Russian military losses.
In the first half of 2025 alone, Russian district and garrison military courts reportedly received more than 26,000 lawsuits seeking to have individuals declared missing or deceased—more than the total filed during all of 2024.
The mass removal of these records effectively blocks independent verification of casualty trends at a time when Russia is sustaining heavy losses across multiple fronts in Ukraine. Mediazona notes that no official explanation has been provided for the deletions.
Earlier, British intelligence said Russia has sustained persistently high casualty rates since launching its illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with likely more than 400,000 soldiers killed or wounded in both 2024 and 2025, while ethnic Russians from major cities continue to make up a disproportionately small share of those losses.
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-8519c2c73c1c389b4ecf8cf3e1adb78b.jpeg "Ukrainian Partisans Destroy Russian Locomotive Supplying Troops Near Kupiansk")
