The publication "People of Baikal" identified the names of 4,555 natives of Pribaikalia who died in Ukraine, 2,300 from Buryatia and 2,255 from the Irkutsk region. This figure is comparable to the population of an average district center. At the same time, as journalists claim, the officially buried are about a third more, but even more is the real figure of all losses.
In rural areas of Buryatia, every fiftieth adult man died. In four of them, more than 2% of men of working age. Among the deceased, 56% were volunteers, 25% were professional soldiers, and 18% were mobilized.
The average age of the deceased is 35 years. Moreover, in the first year of the war, when mainly young contract soldiers died, it was 30 years. After mobilization, the average age sharply rose to 36 years, and by the end of 2024, to 37 years.
The oldest deceased was pensioner Bair Yundunov, who did not live to see his 64th birthday by three weeks. The youngest was Lev Okkert from Bratsk — he signed a contract two months after finishing school, and a month later he died at the age of 18 years and three months.
The identities of the deceased were established based on obituaries published in public Russian sources, from reports by relatives, and data collected by project volunteers at cemeteries in the region.
The fewest deaths occurred in 2022 — 745 soldiers from the two regions. The peak of losses, 140 people per month, occurred in March when Russian troops advanced along the entire perimeter of the borders. The beginning of 2023 saw the peak of deaths for the entire war, as this was when the people mobilized in September 2022 began to be introduced into battle. In January-February, about 450 natives of Pribaikalia died, coinciding with the Russian troops' offensive on Bakhmut. In total, 1,746 soldiers died in 2023. The year 2024 was the bloodiest, with 160 people dying per month, and a minimum of 2,044 soldiers from the Irkutsk region and Buryatia died last year.
Almost three-quarters of all soldiers from Pribaikalia died in the Donetsk region — mortality there was the highest throughout the three years of the war.
From the moment of being sent to the front to the day of death, a soldier from the "list of the deceased" lived less than a year — 312 days. The shortest-lived, only three months on average, were mercenaries from PMC "Wagner", "Storm-Z", and "Storm-V".