The Defense Ministry's tender for military insurance, held back in October, revealed the number of deaths, which the agency provided to insurers for calculations. Thus, in 2015, this figure was 626 people. However, the Defense Ministry specifies that some of the insurance cases occurred in the previous year.

The military department began disclosing the numbers of servicemen killed (for various reasons) when Sergei Ivanov was minister. This practice continued under Anatoly Serdyukov (at one time, the data was even published quarterly). But since 2011, the disclosure of the number of losses has ceased without explanation.

However, in May 2015, President Vladimir Putin classified information about peacetime losses during special operations as classified. When lawyer Ivan Pavlov tried to challenge this decree in the Supreme Court (unsuccessfully), the defendant did not provide any clear definition of a special operation. The military encyclopedia on the Defense Ministry website states that the tasks of the Special Operations Forces include “sabotage and reconnaissance operations, organizing insurgent activities and armed attacks, including providing assistance to foreign states in ensuring their internal security.” A more complete definition is likely contained in the charter or other governing document of the Special Operations Forces of the Defense Ministry, but these are themselves classified documents.

The Ministry of Defense has disclosed the losses of military personnel in 2012-2016

Policy

But in any case, the death of servicemen from illness, road accidents, incidents at training grounds (including their own fault), criminal incidents outside military towns clearly do not relate to special operations. In the US and a number of other countries with modern armies, specific data on losses of special operations forces is also secret, although the figure for total losses in the US is not secret. It can be said with confidence that the overwhelming majority of losses in the Russian army in peacetime are not related to secret tasks and this figure - which society has the right to know - characterizes first and foremost the general state of discipline, service conditions, level of skills and conscientiousness of servicemen. Perhaps, the secrecy of this figure was intended primarily to polish the image of the military leadership, and not to classify some important secrets from the enemy.

Naturally, opponents of the country's military-political course are looking for data on losses in Ukraine and Syria. This is not surprising - when the operation in Syria was just beginning, there were many predictions that Russia would "wash itself in blood", get a "second Afghanistan", etc. Although the losses of Russian servicemen in Syria are not fully disclosed, there is no talk of a repeat of Afghanistan or Chechnya. And the figures that came to light thanks to the insurance tender indicate that the relative losses in the Russian army are about the same as in the American army, and clearly lower than before the reforms of 2008-2009.

626 Russian military deaths per year: a lot or a little