Russia's Staggering Losses in Almost Two Years of War, According to Kyiv

Russia has lost 341,500 soldiers in the more than 21 months of grueling warfare in eastern and southern Ukraine, Kyiv said on Wednesday, with few signs that the high human cost of the conflict will ease.

Moscow's forces in Ukraine have lost 850 fighters in the past 24 hours, the General Staff of Ukraine's military said in an operational update posted to social media.

Newsweek could not independently verify these figures, and has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment via email. However, Western experts believe Ukraine's figures for Russian casualties and equipment losses to be broadly accurate.

The General Staff's tally is the latest indication of the staggering toll nearly two years of relentless war in the air, on the sea and across the land has exacted on the Russian military. It is difficult to get a sense of exactly how many of Russia's elite soldiers, paratroopers, tank crews, conscripted convicts and mercenary fighters have been killed or injured, but the number is thought to be eye-watering.

On Tuesday, Reuters reported that nearly 90 percent of Russia's pre-war personnel were now dead or injured, citing a source familiar with a declassified U.S. intelligence document.

This amounts to around 315,000 Russian troops either killed or injured in the many months of casualty-heavy warfare, according to the publication.

In mid-November, the U.K.'s armed forces minister, James Heappey, told British lawmakers that London believed around 302,000 Russian personnel had been killed or wounded since the start of all-out war.

It is thought that Ukraine's tally, which counts Russian soldiers in the daily-updated count as "liquidated," refers to slain fighters, which would put Kyiv's estimates higher than Western estimations.

But Ukraine has also paid dearly to keep its fight going along the front lines. Like Russia, Ukraine is not forthcoming with its own tallies of its fallen soldiers.

Ukrainian losses are likely lower than Russian losses, Newsweek was previously told, but any given number of casualties would wound Ukraine's military more than it would Russia's much larger force.

A combined almost 500,000 Ukrainian and Russian troops had been killed or injured in the first 18 months of all-out war, The New York Times reported in mid-August, citing U.S. officials.

"It is very difficult to determine casualties in an ongoing conflict since both sides will try to keep the data secret and inflate the number of adversary casualties," Marina Miron, a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of War Studies at King's College London, U.K, told Newsweek earlier this year. "Often these are used in order to send a message to the adversary," she argued.

Hotspots of fighting have typically spurred spikes in casualty figures for both sides. Throughout 2022 and into 2023, losses spiraled around the Donetsk town of Bakhmut, which Russia has controlled since May.

After Russia launched its concerted push on the heavily fortified frontline industrial town of Avdiivka, it is thought to have lost many thousands of soldiers. The weeks between October 10 and late November had "likely seen some of the highest Russian casualty rates of the war so far," the British Defense Ministry said last month.

Since Moscow embarked on its offensive to encircle Avdiivka, it has sustained more than 13,000 casualties around the town, National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson told CNN this week.

In early December, the U.K. government added that up to 280,000 Russian soldiers had been injured in the war, with a further 70,000 killed—this puts total Russian casualties at up to 350,000.

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