Less than a year before his bloodied corpse was found sprawled on a snowy Moscow sidewalk, assassinated by an exploding electric scooter, the Russian general overseeing the country’s nuclear defense forces was shot.
Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov’s killing in December grabbed global headlines. But his hospitalization with a gunshot wound nine months earlier has never been disclosed to the public.
Kirillov’s shooting surfaced in a trove of leaked medical records -- obtained exclusively by RFE/RL -- that provide an unprecedented window into the scope of Russia’s casualties during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine it launched in February 2022 -- now the largest and bloodiest war in Europe since World War II.
Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov was killed when an electric scooter exploded outside his apartment building in Moscow
His hospitalization for more than a month at the most prestigious facility in Russia's sprawling military medical complex is among the records in a massive nationwide Defense Ministry database of nearly 166,000 soldiers that RFE/RL obtained from a Russian defector.
The database includes hospitalization records for senior generals down to rank-and-file privates -- along with private mercenaries from at least 10 countries -- beginning in February 2022 until mid-June 2024, meaning it does not reflect that last eight months of fighting, some of the war’s bloodiest.
How Many Have Been Killed or Wounded in Ukraine?
For both sides, the toll is staggering: in excess of 1 million killed or wounded, according to Western estimates. For Ukraine, at least 46,000 soldiers have been killed, and around 380,000 wounded, according to figures cited by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy earlier this month. That figure is considered by experts to be an undercount.
By contrast, Russian casualties -- killed or wounded -- exceed 700,000, according to Western estimates as of December. An analysis by the International Institute for Strategic Studies estimated that at least 172,000 Russian soldiers have been killed and 611,000 wounded, more than half of whom were severely wounded, unable to fight again.
Of those casualties, a significant number cycled through military hospitals and ended up in the files of the Defense Ministry’s Main Military Medical Directorate -- the official entity that oversees dozens of brick-and-mortar hospitals and thousands of staff and personnel across the country.
The database was provided to RFE/RL by Sergeant Aleksei Zhilyayev, who commanded a military evacuation unit attached to 144th Guards Motor Rifle Division and has since fled to France, where he is seeking political asylum.
An RFE/RL analysis of the records identified 165,584 unique entries: names, ranks, dates of admission, dates of discharge, location of treatment, type of wounds or injuries, and units in which soldiers served -- not only regular units, but also the now-defunct mercenary group Wagner and the military intelligence agency, known as the GRU.
RFE/RL filtered and organized the database to eliminate duplicate entries and account for clerical errors. To verify or corroborate its accuracy, RFE/RL also matched a subset of the entries with publicly available information -- social media posts, news reports -- to identify specific individuals found in the records.
For example, President Vladimir Putin visited a Moscow military hospital in May 2022, greeting wounded soldiers. Photographs distributed by the state news agency TASS showed Putin with two soldiers, one of whom appears in the database.
RFE/RL messaged the social-media accounts of several of the personnel whose names appear in the database, seeking further information. Only one, a Chinese national, responded, confirming that he fought for Russia against Ukraine but declining to give further details.
How Does Russia Treat Its Wounded Soldiers?
The database represents only a subset of the total Russian wounded in the war; it likely omits troops treated in the field and returned quickly to battle, and those treated in civilian hospitals. It also includes military personnel who were treated for injuries unrelated to combat, such as Kirillov, who was admitted to the Main Military Clinical Hospital in Moscow on March 3, 2024, and discharged five weeks later after being treated for a gunshot wound to the “upper right thigh.”
The date, location, and circumstances of Kirillov’s shooting remain unclear, and the Defense Ministry did not respond to a request for comment. Sources with Ukraine’s main security agency, known as the SBU, claimed responsibility for the exploding scooter that killed Kirillov.
The database also includes records from military hospitals and clinics across the country, as well as in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula Moscow forcibly seized in 2014, and a small number from Belarus, a close ally of Moscow.
Dara Masicott, a Washington-based analyst who recently published a major report on the Kremlin’s coming efforts to rebuild and “reconstitute” its military, said the database reflects how Russia’s armed forces have transformed over the past three years as the invasion -- which the Kremlin expected to be swift, short, and decisive -- turned into a massive war of attrition.
As Ukrainian forces first mounted an agile defense -- and later, large-scale offensives -- they inflicted substantial casualties, forcing Russian authorities to widen recruitment efforts to replenish decimated units.
Wagner mercenaries became a visible part of the force makeup. So did the tens of thousands of prison inmates who were enticed -- first by Wagner, and later by the Defense Ministry itself -- to fight in exchange for freedom.
But the biggest transformation came when Putin in September 2022 ordered a partial mobilization of the country’s reserves, drawing up to 300,000 more men into the fight. Recruiters also tapped a wider pool of recruits using extraordinarily lucrative financial incentives.
The result, Masicott said in an interview, is a significant transformation of the military, with wide variations in training, experience, and age. For example, soldiers’ average age has increased significantly over time, with a rise in the number of those 50 and older after 2022, a shift that is reflected in the leaked database.
She said that likely stems from economic incentives that have enticed older men, but younger recruits less so.
The database also shows how the types of wounds registered by military medics remained mostly unchanged during the more than two years covered by the records.
That suggests that combat medicine protocols -- both how wounded soldiers are treated in the field, and how they are evacuated -- have not improved since the start of the invasion, Masicott said -- even as the overall size of the force that invaded Ukraine has expanded, from around 180,000 in February 2022 to more than 500,000, according to the Royal United Service Institute, a London think tank.
“For this number to remain so static, regardless of offensives, regardless of being on the defense, there’s basically no change,” said Masicott, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “This tells me that they've not improved casualty evacuation. And guys who are getting hit by shrapnel or losing a limb, either from mines or artillery or drones, they just don't make it. They don't make it at all.”
“The Russian Army has failed to seriously improve the system of evacuation of the wounded during the war. Military personnel who receive severe shrapnel wounds or, for example, lose limbs to mines, artillery or drones simply do not survive,” she said.
In an interview with RFE/RL, Zhilyayev agreed that Russian evacuation protocols had not improved markedly over the course of the war. At the same time, both sides accuse each other of targeting medical teams trying to evacuate the wounded.
Zhilyayev said that sometime in 2024, Russia forward units began encountering Ukrainian forward-deployed units utilizing drones -- a technology that has played a critical role for both sides -- to target medevac units. That further reduced the likelihood that a severely wounded soldier would make it to treatment alive, he said.
“That's why it turned out that the lighter [wounded] ended up in hospitals; they were able to get out [of the field] themselves,” Zhilayev said.
How Often Are Russian Officers Hospitalized?
Roughly five months after the launch of the invasion, after Russia’s initial plans stalled in the face of Ukrainian defenses, and ingenuity, Kyiv began receiving Western supplies of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, known widely by their acronym, HIMARS.
The U.S.-supplied, mobile multiple-rocket launcher fires precision missiles with various ranges, depending on the type. Ukraine also received a similar missile system called M270s. The weapons made a clear impact on the battlefield, Western and Ukrainian experts said. At the time, Zelenskyy claimed they were changing the course of the war.
Ukrainian forces also used HIMARS systems to target forward command posts, temporary field posts frequently visited by senior Russian officers.
After June 2022, the Russians “took about a month to figure this out, that their command posts were getting schwacked everywhere, and then they moved them back,” Masicott said. “And so by the August time period, you see that number decline, and then it has more or less stayed the same.”
That is reflected in the leaked database, which shows the percentage of wounded senior ranking officers declining toward the end of 2022.
The percentage of wounded lower-ranking officers, like lieutenants, meanwhile, remained relatively unchanged, which Masicott attributes to those ranks deploying to frontline positions, something that in the U.S. Army would be done by lower-ranked sergeants. As a result, she said, lieutenants are likely being killed off in the field rather than being evacuated and hospitalized.
“I think they're just being killed. They’re so far forward with the guys that they're just dying and they're not making it [to hospitals],” she said. “That's my interpretation, because there's no other way to really explain this flatlining, because the lieutenants are fighting at the front.”
Are Wounded Soldiers Sent Back to Battle?
Another notable data point: the severity of the wounds and injuries recorded by medical administrators. Just over 2,200 “severe” or “critical” cases appear in the tally; more than 58,600 involving “moderate” wounds; and more than 80,200 with “light” wounds.
As part of efforts to maintain adequate unit strength in the field, Russian commanders have prioritized getting wounded soldiers redeployed quickly. This has helped reinforce Russia’s ability to grind down Ukrainian troops across the roughly 1,100-square kilometer front line, despite eye-watering casualty rates.
In December 2022, 10 months after the launch of the invasion, the head of the military medical directorate, Dmitry Trishkin, said that 97 percent of all wounded soldiers end up being sent back to the battlefield.
That figure is likely overstated, Zhilyayev said, though not by much: “If a person can be brought alive to a medical unit, he is very likely to survive.”
Amputations, meanwhile, which number more than 3,200 cases in the database, are the only category of injury that preclude a soldier returning to the fight, Zhilyayev told RFE/RL. The database includes minor amputations -- such as a finger or toe -- and major amputations, such as feet, legs, arms, hands.
Vladimir Golsky, a 19-year-old private who served in the 433rd Regiment of the 27th Guards Motorized Rifle Division, was hospitalized in April 2024 and had his left foot amputated, according to the database. Seven months later, he appeared alongside his mother in a photograph she posted to her account on Odnoklassniki, a Russian social media platform: “I waited for my son!”she wrote.
She did not respond to a message from RFE/RL.
While combat medics in the field record severity of wounds accurately, medical personnel in larger hospitals and similar facilities were pressured to downgrade the condition of wounds in their paperwork, Zhilyayev said. That ensures more soldiers are returned to battle more quickly, and it also helps minimize the insurance payouts made to the wounded, which depend on the severity of the casualty, he said.
Overall, he said, the database is routinely circulated directly to military commands, via unclassified e-mail: mainly as a way to track personnel.
“Why is it sent…back to the army?” Zhilyayev said. “To look for people. Because people get lost: a man left the unit with a wound, and it will be unknown where he ended up.”
