War fatalities in Russia in 2022 estimated via excess male mortality

Dmitry Kobak, Alexey Bessudnov, Alexander Ershov, Tatiana Mikhailova and Alexei Raksha

No xcrme, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: In this paper, we used excess deaths among young males to estimate the number of Russian fatalities in the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2022. We based our calculations on the official mortality statistics in 2022, split by age and gender. To separate excess deaths due to war from those due to Covid-19, we relied on the ratio of male to female deaths, and extrapolated the 2015--19 trend to get the baseline value for 2022. We found noticeable excess male mortality in all age groups between 15 and 49, with 20,600±1,000 excess male deaths overall. This estimate was obtained after excluding all HIV deaths that showed complex dynamics unrelated to the war. Depending on the modelling assumptions, the estimated number of deaths varied from about 15,700 to about 23,600, with 20,600 corresponding to our preferred model. Our estimate should be treated as a lower bound on the true number of deaths as the data do not include either the Russian military personnel missing in action and not officially declared dead, or the deaths registered in the Ukrainian territories annexed in 2022.

Date: 2023-11-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis and nep-hea
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:xcrme

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/xcrme

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