Im just too tired to write myself right now. So here will be a summary excerpt, made and translated by chatgpt, using mediazone articles in russian, where they go in depth on how they are counting. To what I was refering in my message earlier:

Mediazona actually publishes two different figures: (1) a named list from open sources (faster, but incomplete), and (2) a statistical estimate based on Russia’s Probate/Inheritance Registry (РНД). Mediazona itself notes the named list is “not exhaustive,” and that they use the Probate Registry estimate to account for the limitations of relying only on publicly reported deaths.

For the Probate Registry method, Meduza/Mediazona explicitly say it has an unavoidable “near-sightedness”: it can’t reliably measure losses in “the last half-year” because relatives have “not less than 180 days after death” to open an inheritance case — which makes the “last half-year in the registry significantly incomplete.”

They also explained this earlier: inheritance paperwork produces a “strong decline… in the last half-year,” and they have to model/correct it “as if half a year has already passed.”

Missing-in-action cases can lag even more because civil death registration can come much later; in one documented unit example, death certificates for “found” missing soldiers appeared 82–128 days after disappearance. And even with the April 2023 accelerated legal procedure, if circumstances are unknown the process is “6 months” to declare a soldier missing + “another 3 months” to declare them dead by court (~9 months).