Two million soldiers from both sides have been killed, maimed, or registered missing in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a study of the state of the war claims.
The scale of Russia’s losses in Ukraine are accelerating as it loses the initiative in its invasion, a report published by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) claims. The security think tank states the number of casualties in the war has now hit the symbolically significant milestone of two million casualties, and claims the vast majority of combat deaths have been experienced by the less tactically sophisticated forces of the Russian Federation.
While two million casualties is huge and makes the Ukraine War the largest conflict experienced by any major power since the Second World War, the grim milestone appears to have been reached slower than the CSIS previously claimed. A similar report by the same body estimated the two million mark would pass as soon as this Spring, now months past.
Per the CSIS report, of the two million estimated military casualties now inflicted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine 1.4 million are Russians. Of those, between 400-450,000 are Russian war dead, while the remaining million are Russian wounded and missing in action.
It further claimed there were between 150-150,000 Ukrainian killed in action among 600,000 total Ukrainian casualties, including killed, missing, and wounded.
The Ukraine war has generally been recorded with incomplete or questionable statistics on casualties — neither side has an incentive to truthfully report these figures — but Western estimates have persistently claimed that Russian deaths well exceeded Ukrainian ones. But the CSIS report goes further, claiming the ratio of three Russian casualties to every Ukrainian for the first years of the conflict has now hit as high as eight Russian casualties to every Ukrainian this year.
If true, this means Russian casualties are now greater than Russia’s ability to recruit fresh troops, and “Russian fatalities in Ukraine are more than four times greater than all U.S. fatalities in all wars combined since World War II, and more than nine times greater than all Soviet and Russian fatalities in all wars combined since World War II”.
These figures exclude civilian casualties.
The CSIS attributed Russia’s extremely high death toll to factors including “Russia’s attrition strategy, its failure to effectively conduct combined arms and joint warfare, its poor tactics and training, corruption, and low morale” as well as effective Ukrainian defence. It further claimed: “According to some estimates, over 90 percent of Russian casualties are from drone attacks rather than a result of human-to-human engagements. Casualty rates are extremely high for soldiers that enter the kill zone.”
The very high death toll in Ukraine on both sides has been one of the most frequently cited reasons by U.S. President Donald Trump for wanting to see the war ended. Calling the war a “horrible massacre” in which “tremendous” numbers of “young, beautiful people” are being killed, President Trump has recently said the Ukraine War is his firm foreign policy focus and called on Russia to “make a deal”.