Russia's missing men

What tracking Russian MIAs tells us about their manpower

"Dear Administrator! Please publish my plea on your channel, maybe some of your readers have information about my brother."

This is how a long list of posts starting with the hashtag #поиск (#search) started appearing on Russian Telegram channels t.me/poisk_in_ua. The channel is known for posting death notices of Russian soldiers in Ukraine based on info from relatives or videos. The date of the first post was the 26th of October 2022 and such posts would only grow over time. The posters, desperate for any information about they relatives who were part of the Russian full scale war on Ukraine. Were willing to post unit numbers, location data, personal features and tattoos, hoping against hope the missing soldiers would be found. And what these people were willing to share provided us with a unique look into the dysfunction gripping the Russian Armed Forces.

The data analysis took over a month and a half of work sifting through all the posts but it did indeed yield results. Certain patterns emerged out of the data that are fairly interesting when looking at the efforts the Russian forces have been putting in Ukraine. The data also confirmed some of the limits of such collections when using it to assess what units were fighting where. For example, GRU units were almost completely absent from the requests for further information, despite existing evidence that they were employed at the front in key sectors.

To start off, most of the data for missing people before 2023 was very limited. In the case of Wagner personnel, it seems that the people they recruited from prisons or through their regular channels were given very limited information on the tasks they were going to carry out. Usually people last contacted their relatives at the end of their expedited training and afterwards lost contact. It seems Wagner recruiters were more disciplined in terms of OPSEC than the rest of the Russian forces operating in Ukraine. The rest of the early data is of less use as it seems the channels hadn't adopted a proper structure for missing person requests. The little data that is usable for the middle of 2022 is focused on Lyman and Lysyschansk and the operations around them, but losses seem far fewer than other sectors later in the war.There’s less than three dozen entries for these operations compared to missing posts in the triple digits for other operations. We know that since missing people notices will be repeated by relatives over time. There were over 50 such duplications in the posts, so the lack of requests by family members would suggest that at the time of the fighting in late 2022 the Russian system was more capable of documenting its losses and keeping their casualty tallies in check. That is to say the posts about missing people who last contacted family members in the middle to late 2022 are an order of magnitude less than posts by family members about people missing in 2023. To sum up, what these separate data points say, the lack of information about people became a proper trend in 2023 and the fighting appears to be more intense and devastating for Russian units as the war progressed.

Compared to that, by early to mid 2023 the situation seems to have changed drastically. The start were the losses during the attacks around Vuhledar with the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade suffering 11 people missing directly attributed to Vuhledar and another 7 people missing without a last known location. A considerable number, given that we're dealing with only 1725 posts of missing soldiers compared to tens of thousands of KIA posts tracked by various media outlets and activist groups. It appears that during the fighting in late 2022 and early 2023 at Vuhledar, the 155th Brigade's record keeping collapsed , especially given that it was already augmented by mobilized men to reconstitute the unit. This is known because of the posts that list the status of the 155th servicemen half are contractees and half are mobilized.

A similar trend was seen with the LNR/DNR units around Avdiivka at the time, but with a notable difference. Yes, the data did include the 1st, 111th,112th and 114th former People's Militia brigades, but it also included missing people from the Russian mobilized regiments with the 1004th leading the tally. It seems as the fighting intensified starting from the beginning of 2023, record keeping has also deteriorated. Apparently in order to offset the losses, mobilized regiments were integrated into the old separatist units. and those mobilized units were then beginning to deteriorate themselves. We know this as only six of the posts related to Avdiivka state that the person missing was a contractee, the rest are dominated by mobilized be it from Russia or from the early LNR/DNR mobilisation. This is why these units could launch an assault late in 2023. They had heavy losses in the continuous fighting in early to mid 2023. Yet they were simultaneously being reinforced by mobilized units to replenish their infantry, but at the expense of unit cohesion as multiple regiments being attached to a brigade with the units lacking any commonality doesn't result in stellar levels of interoperability.

By mid 2023, as the Ukrainian counteroffensive intensified, is when the system apparently reached a breaking point all over the front, but mostly on the heavily pressed portions of it. Units that were heavily engaged or suffered considerable losses stopped couldn’t keep up with the reporting of KIAs. There are 5 definite posts about people missing from the 205th Motorized Rifle Brigade that was covering the left bank of the Dnipro river. The posts about missing people from this unit include information that lines up with the time of the UA operations in the area and with location, the islands and the bank of the river. This is in line with parts of that unit going missing up till the cutoff point for the data of September 2023. There's also evidence that various units lost people in the flooding after the Kahovka Dam's destruction — something echoed in pro-Russian Telegram channels.

The bigger losses were, however, elsewhere. On the three southern axes of attack we see extensive evidence of that. Combined, these account for 128 of the records which have a last known location given. 18 of those are VDV (Airborne Forces) and 12 are Naval infantry. This is in line with the 810th Naval Infantry Brigade being heavily engaged as reinforcements in the Robotyne direction and later augmented by the VDV's 56th, 108th, 234th and 247th regiments. The low numbers of VDV missing could be attributed to them being sent late in the fighting and people not looking for relatives just yet or, what is more likely, the better staff work of the VDV prior to their HQs being hit in September/October/ November. The 810th Naval Infantry, however, seemed to have had its staff work fall behind and losses mounting. This is important as at a later point this unit was used as reinforcements on another front, a sign of a limited pool of reserves in the South if a unit with high losses was used in this role. Another thing that the data is clear on is that all the units mentioned were heavily reliant on mobilized men and these also had convicts incorporated as rushed replenishment.

In Bakhmut is where we see this trend exacerbated. We can see something very dramatic in the data related to Bakhmut — that both new volunteers and convicts recruited from the correctional colonies seem to have gotten similarly light training. With people being rushed to the front and going missing within as little as 2-3 weeks since their recruitment giving almost no time for even limited training before they disappeared in the meat grinder that was the southern flank of Bakhmut. By late September this is starting to show a true desperation on the side of Russian commanders with entire regiments of mobilized soldiers being expended there. Prior to late 2023 the data doesn’t show such large clumps of soldiers from a single mobilized regiment being reported as missing. We get a clear message that the 1008th regiment is heavily engaged and then disbanded due to losses. by 22nd of September, just а week after relatives posted a cry for help from the soldiers on VK, a popular Russian social network. The video featured soldiers with complaints that are usually repeated in such films, insufficient artillery support, anemic counter battery fire and poor planning by commanders.

All of this suggests that in late 2023 the recruitment of new volunteers and convicts and then their transfer to heavily engaged frontline units barely gives them enough men to keep the current tempo of fighting even before the drastic losses in October and November at Avdiivka. A far cry from Medvedev's claim that tens of thousands of men are joining up every month. And the loss of men is so heavy that even the naval infantry and VDV have started taking up former convicts to make up for past losses. The training is also far from sufficient with even volunteers getting next to no refresher training before being thrown into heavy combat. However, it has to be said that there still exist reserves as the map of mobilized men by origin shows several areas of Russia that have not seen any men reported missing, so a number of the regiments created in 2022 seem to still have not been engaged. But the 810th being used as reinforcements on the left bank of Dnipro in November would suggest some of the reserves have been exhausted and now even heavily reduced units are used as “fire brigades” for hotspots.

To sum this all up, it is perhaps best to juxtapose the findings with the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive to regain greater areas of the country and take over key logistical hubs. The data showed us that the feat of stopping the Ukrainian assault took immense Russian reserves, a collapse in their chains of commands and regimental and brigade formations being destroyed or nearly so. Whilst there is no data on missing mobilized soldiers from several Russian regions, it did show quite well the red path the fighting had carved through Russia. In November and December of2023 the Russian armed forces are still capable with immense losses to move the front somewhat. Going into 2024, we see a Russian army that’s desperate for men, low on quality troops and quickly depleting both reserves and reinforcements faster than even prison recruitment can keep up. A state in which it hasn’t been for at least a year since before the first wave of mobilization, while the Kremlin once again seems reluctant to make the difficult decision to hold another.

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