Putin Needs '5 Years' To Refill Russian Army As Casualties Reach 550K: UK

It will currently take Russian President Vladimir Putin five years to get Moscow's army back to its February 2022 strength, a prominent British military chief has said, as the war in Ukraine drags on and casualties mount, with little prospect of an end to the conflict in sight.

Russia's military has now sustained an estimated 550,000 casualties in the nearly two and a half years of full-scale war in Ukraine, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the U.K. chief of the defense staff, said on Tuesday.

"Our assessments are that it will take Putin five years to reconstitute the Russian army to where it was in February 2022," Radakin said during an address at a land warfare conference in London. It will take another five years beyond that to "rectify the weaknesses that the war has revealed," he added.

The figure of 550,000 casualties comes in just below statistics put forward by Kyiv. As of Tuesday, Ukraine's military said Moscow's troops had sustained 568,980 casualties since February 2022, including 1,220 in the previous 24 hours.

Newsweek has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment via email.

Casualty counts are very difficult to pinpoint, and numbers put forward by either party in a conflict are treated with caution. Western estimates of Russian casualties have typically broadly matched Ukraine's numbers in recent months, and the British government said in late May that Russia's killed and wounded had surpassed half a million since early 2022.

The BBC's Russian service and Russian independent media outlet Mediazona said earlier this month that they had confirmed the identities of almost 60,000 Russian military personnel killed in Ukraine up to mid-July.

Ukraine's figures have indicated Russia has suffered its most lethal months this summer, as it made incremental gains in eastern Ukraine and pressed down on Kyiv's troops across the border in the northeastern Kharkiv region.

"Right now, Russia is making tactical gains" to take towns at villages in Ukraine at "a huge cost," Radakin said.

Russia is tight-lipped about its own losses. Former Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said in September 2022 that just under 6,000 Russian soldiers had been killed in Ukraine in the first six months of the full-scale war.

Ukraine has said Russia is able to inject up to 30,000 new soldiers each month into its ranks. Kyiv's figures suggest Moscow is sustaining slightly more casualties than this figure every month.

Kyiv, too, is known to have sustained significant casualties, but rarely releases concrete figures. In February 2024, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said 31,000 Ukrainian personnel had been killed since the war began.

Putin said in early June that Ukraine's "irretrievable losses" were five times higher than Russia's, but did not provide overall figures.

Western intelligence and experts suggest many of the Russian soldiers currently on the front lines have limited training—often volunteers or convicts—and cannot carry out complex operations. The BBC's Russian Service and Mediazona's count indicates significant numbers of those killed were former inmates or volunteers.

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