The costs of the war in Ukraine for the North Caucasus

Lower than expected, at least now

Russian investigative media outlet Mediazona have published their latest dataset on Russia’s losses in its war on Ukraine. The headline figure is that they have identified 95,300 soldiers killed, including foreigners and volunteers. But what does the data say about the costs of the war for the North Caucasus?

First, let’s look at the geographical distribution: Stavropol leads the way with 1,480 casualties, slightly ahead of Dagestan (1,320). Then come North Ossetia (712),  Chechnya (312), Kabardino-Balkaria (241), Karachayevo-Cherkessia (180), and Ingushetia (123). In total, the North Caucasus contributed 4,368 casualties, or 4.58% of the total.

These figures are not necessarily what you would expect if losses were evenly distributed and the population of each federal subject is taken into account — as the following table shows. North Ossetia is clearly suffering disproportionate losses when compared to Chechnya, Ingushetia, or Kabardino-Balkaria, and Stavropol Kray should be behind slightly larger Dagestan. The same distortions are seen when we look at just the male population — something that makes sense, given that the overwhelming majority of casualties are male and the gender divide varies (according to the 2020 census).

The national averages, by the way, are 6.47 losses per 10,000 people and 13.93 per 10,000 males. Whichever way you calculate it, it’s been a very bad war for North Ossetia, and a relatively good one for Chechnya and Ingushetia. Relatively.

Second, we can see from the data how the picture has changed since the early days of the war. In 2022, there was a lot of debate in the region about the social costs of the war. Dagestan, in particular, witnessed protests against mobilisation, while Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov argued the republic was already doing more than its fair share. These debates have died down a lot since then, and we can see why: Stavropol suffered 29% of all its losses in 2022, whereas Dagestan experienced 38% and Chechnya a shocking 64%. The North Caucasian republics, in other words, were bearing a higher burden of the war in 2022 compared to the last few years. As a whole, the region contributed 8.6% of Russia’s total casualties in 2022, but only 3.28% for the period since then. My suspicion is that — as time has passed and the Russian war effort has become more coordinated — there has been an effort to shift the costs of the war away from the areas with greater protest potential, and that has worked to the advantage of the North Caucasus.

Third, we can think about what the data doesn’t show. Mediazona only counts people it can identify: Therefore, it estimates 165,000 military deaths overall. In other words, it thinks it has document less than 60% of the total. The overall war figures are higher than the individual years added up because in about 30% of cases they are confident that someone died, but not when it happened. There are good reasons for thinking that undercounting is much worse for the region, and Chechnya in particular. Chechnya, after all, has a much more repressive environment when the rest of Russia, and there has been a concerted regime effort to conceal losses to avoid a public backlash.

None of this data is perfect, but it does show the value of painstakingly collecting information scattered across the internet into systematic datasets. Which is good, because that’s what I spend a lot of time doing!