Ukraine’s military released a report on Tuesday (August 11) showing that since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the total casualties of the Russian army have reached 1.46 million, nearing the 1.5 million mark.
According to a report by “News Weekly” on Tuesday, the figure of nearly 1.5 million Russian military casualties announced by Kyiv includes both killed and wounded personnel, with some wounded soldiers returning to the front lines after recovery, even being counted multiple times due to repeated injuries.
The statistics from Western institutions are slightly lower than the total casualties of the Russian army announced by Ukraine. An estimate released by the U.S. think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) last month indicated that the total casualties of the Russian army since the outbreak of the war are approximately 1.4 million, with around 450,000 fatalities.
Independent Russian media outlet Mediazona and the BBC Russian service recently published a study confirming the identities of 236,066 deceased Russian military personnel. The UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) estimated in May that the number of Russian military fatalities is close to 500,000.
Due to the difficulty of independently verifying wartime casualty figures, the data released by both Ukraine and Russia are under scrutiny from the international community. Experts suggest that the warring parties may exaggerate their adversary’s losses while avoiding disclosing their own casualties.
Analysts point out that in the early stages of the Russia-Ukraine war, Russian casualties were primarily concentrated among elite and professional units. By the second half of 2022, the number of volunteer soldiers killed began to rise.
Subsequently, Russia deployed prison inmates and members of the Wagner private military company to the battlefield. These soldiers were often used in “meat grinder” style offensives, repeatedly launching assaults on heavily fortified Ukrainian positions to wear down Kyiv’s defensive forces. They were known for slowly gaining small patches of territory but at an extremely heavy cost.
By the autumn of 2024, volunteer soldiers once again became the largest category of Russian military fatalities.
As the conflict continues, Moscow is actively seeking to replenish frontline troops. Ukrainian President Zelensky stated last month that Russian President Putin is preparing to re-enlist up to 500,000 people in military service this fall.
Previously, Russia had called up 300,000 reservists in the fall of 2022, sparking domestic protests and prompting some citizens to leave the country to avoid conscription. Since then, Russia has relied more on financial incentives and other measures to attract people to military service to avoid another large-scale mobilization.
At the same time, Zelensky indicated over the weekend that Moscow may further rely on foreign troops, with as many as 50,000 North Korean soldiers possibly being sent to Russia soon. Earlier, North Korea had dispatched forces to Russia, and North Korean soldiers have been participating in combat on the Russian-Ukrainian battlefield.
Recently, the Russian military escalated its airstrikes on Ukraine and increasingly employed ballistic missiles and hypersonic missiles for attacks. Ukraine, in turn, continues to target Russian oil refineries and other energy and logistics facilities inside Russia, aiming to weaken the energy lifelines that fuel Moscow’s war machine.
According to a report by “Kyiv Independent” on Tuesday, an analysis report on the progress of the battlefield and the cost of the war indicated that while Russia had gained a small amount of territory in some regions, it had paid a huge human and economic price for it.
The report showed that Russia had seized around 30 square kilometers of land in June 2026, with approximately 39,500 casualties during the same period, and the war expenditure and losses related to attacks approached nearly $19 billion.
Currently, peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine are essentially at a standstill. With ongoing increases in Russian military casualties and Moscow’s constant need to replenish troops, how Russia maintains its long-term combat capabilities will be a crucial observation point in the development of the conflict.