Russian War Losses Pass Grim 1-Million Milestone

Miami Herald

3 days ago

Russian casualties fighting against Ukraine have surpassed 1 million, according to Kyiv's military, as ceasefire negotiations yield little progress and Moscow ramps up its summer offensive.
Moscow is known for what have been dubbed "meat assaults," or using waves of many soldiers—often lacking sufficient training or adequate equipment—to attack Ukrainian positions. Casualty counts, as reported by Kyiv, have typically spiked during prolonged attacks on fortified Ukrainian positions, such as on the Donetsk cities of Bakhmut and Avdiivka.
Moscow has sustained 1,000,340 casualties since the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Kyiv's General Staff said on Thursday.
One million Russian soldiers being killed or injured is a "stunning and grisly milestone," the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said earlier this month
The figures from Ukraine's General Staff are very difficult to independently verify, but statistics published by Kyiv are frequently cited by Western officials. The British government put Russia's likely total casualty count since February 2022 at 920,000 back in April.
Experts caution that enemy casualty counts published by each side during a conflict are typically inflated. Ukraine does not disclose its own casualties.
"Even if you're on the ground, it's very difficult for you to count casualties," said Marina Miron, a postdoctoral researcher with the War Studies Department at King's College London.
A weapon of psychological warfare for both sides, tallies of those killed or injured don't take into account the missing, Miron told Newsweek.
Newsweek has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment via email.
Independent Russian outlet Mediazona and the BBC's Russian service, which jointly compile a list of named deceased soldiers, said a confirmed figure of 1,762 troops had been killed between May 23 and June 6, bringing the total tally of Russian fighters known to have died in the war to 111,387.
The true tally will be far higher, the outlets note, as many deaths in combat are not made public.
Russia controls roughly a fifth of Ukraine, and has intensified its attacks in the country's east, as well as close to the northeastern city of Sumy in recent weeks.
Moscow has said its troops reached the western border of Ukraine's battered Donetsk region, and have started an "offensive" in neighboring Dnipropetrovsk. The Kremlin said on Monday it was attempting to carve out a "buffer zone."
Western and Ukrainian analysts said Russia has advanced close to the village of Horikhove, roughly a mile from the Dnipropetrovsk border.
Moscow has claimed to have annexed Donetsk and Luhansk—two regions collectively known as the Donbas—along with the southern Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts of Ukraine.
The Kremlin has controlled Crimea, the peninsula to the south of mainland Ukraine, since it seized the territory from Kyiv in 2014. Dnipropetrovsk has not been annexed by Russian decree.
Andriy Kovalenko, an official with Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, said on Monday that Russia's statements about a Dnipropetrovsk offensive were "not true." He later said on Wednesday Moscow's military had "tried to send attack aircraft" to the Dnipropetrovsk border, which he claimed were "destroyed."
Advances in Donetsk, Luhansk, the northeastern Kharkiv region and elsewhere across Ukraine have come at an eye-watering cost for Russia. Moscow has seized a "paltry" 5,000 square kilometers (almost 2,000 square miles) of the country since January 2024, equivalent to about 1 percent of Ukraine, according to the CSIS think tank.
Russia initially swept up 120,000 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory in the first five weeks of its invasion, the think tank said.
The CSIS put the number of Russian soldiers killed in the invasion at up to 250,000, a demonstration of what it called Russian President Vladimir Putin's "blatant disregard for his soldiers."
The Kremlin leader is "afraid that sooner or later someone in Russia might start asking questions like: '[In the name of what he had sacrificed a million or more people?'" said Oleksandr Merezhko, the chair of Ukraine's parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee.
"This fear is one of the reasons why he is doubling down on his aggressive war efforts," Merezhko told Newsweek.
Russian fatalities in Ukraine since its tanks rolled into the country in February 2022 are 15 times higher than the losses the Soviet Union sustained in Afghanistan, and 10 times those of the brutal conflict in Chechnya, the CSIS said.
"For Russia, the end justifies the means," an anonymous former Russian defense official told The Guardian newspaper in October. "Before the war, such casualties would have seemed unimaginable," they added. "Now, it appears that the generals hardly care as long as they meet Putin's demands."
Kyiv said Moscow sustained more than 628,000 of the million reported casualties in the past year and a half.
Throughout 2022, just over 106,000 people were killed or injured—equivalent to 340 people on average each day, the general staff said.
This more than doubled in 2023 to 693 daily casualties on average, the military said. In 2024, it surged to an average of 1,177 people per day.
Figures from Ukraine's authorities for the first half of 2025 put the average number of daily Russian casualties at 1,286.
The number of Russian soldiers killed or wounded on the battlefield in 2025 had exceeded 200,000 by the start of June, the Ukrainian military said. U.K. intelligence assessed in mid-April Russia that had sustained roughly 138,000 casualties fighting Ukraine up until that point in 2025.
On several occasions in late 2024, Ukraine said Russia had suffered more than 2,000 casualties in the space of 24 hours. At the start of that year, Moscow seized the Ukrainian stronghold of Avdiivka, then setting its sights on the Donetsk cities of Pokrovsk and Toretsk and slowing inching westward. Russia also battled a Ukrainian incursion into the Russian Kursk region from August 2024 until March 2025.
Regarding the difference between the BBC and Independent Russian outlet Mediazona's tally of 111,387 confirmed Russian deaths in Ukraine over the course of the war and the far higher unconfirmed figure, Emily Ferris, a senior research fellow with the Royal United Services Institute, an influential British defense think tank, told Newsweek: "Either way, it's a significant chunk of the male population. There's no denying it."
Analysts say Russia will likely be able to continue its war effort against Ukraine, with has a much smaller pool of possible recruits, despite the purported casualty figures.
The Russian government has offered attractive salaries for contract soldiers, and has two rounds of military conscription each year, said Ferris.
But it will want to avoid another mobilization, which previously proved deeply unpopular, Ferris added. Moscow declared a partial mobilization of 300,000 reservists in September 2022.
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