Casualties of the Russo-Ukrainian war

• 1. Introduction

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  Among the casualties of the Russo-Ukrainian war are the villagers of Yahidne, north of Kyiv. While Russian forces held their community, they sheltered in a school basement and wrote the names of their dead on the wall. Records in this conflict have been pieced together under conditions like these. Governments classified their military losses. International bodies openly acknowledged their official tallies fell short of the truth. The conflict began in 2014, when six people were killed during Russia's annexation of Crimea. Its full-scale phase, launched on the 24th of February 2022, has generated estimates of killed and wounded ranging from 400,000 to 1.5 million. Political scientist Neta Crawford calculated that by July 2025, the war was killing an average of 7,690 people per month. That rate exceeded both the Gaza war and the post-2001 conflict in Afghanistan. What does it take to count the dead in a war where both governments treat their losses as state secrets? And who is bearing the heaviest toll?

• 2. War Before the War

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  From the 6th of April 2014, a separate war had already been underway in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region. By the United Nations count, that conflict claimed between 14,200 and 14,400 lives from its start through the 31st of December 2021. The breakdown tells a story of two armies and a civilian population caught between them. Roughly 6,500 pro-Russian separatist fighters were killed, along with around 4,400 Ukrainian soldiers and 3,404 civilians. The vast majority of deaths fell in the first year, before the Minsk agreements offered any prospect of a ceasefire.

  Among the foreign civilian deaths, 298 of the 306 were passengers and crew of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, shot down over the conflict zone. The remainder included Italian journalist Andrea Rocchelli, his Russian interpreter and activist Andrei Mironov, four Russian media workers, and a Lithuanian diplomat. On the Ukrainian side, among those killed was former Chechen rebel commander Isa Munayev.

  By 2020, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator placed Ukraine among the countries most affected by explosive remnants of war in the world. The physical contamination of the Donbas had spread steadily over six years of conflict. Close to 1,200 people had been injured or killed by mines and unexploded ordnance since 2014. A UNICEF report released in December 2019 found that 172 of those casualties were children.

  The National Museum of Military History eventually catalogued 4,535 Ukrainian deaths by the 23rd of February 2022, becoming the government's official source. Even that figure was acknowledged as incomplete. For most of the conflict, official casualty counts had been unreliable. Medics, soldiers, and activists reported that the Ukrainian Army was drastically understating its losses. At least one lawmaker publicly raised the problem.

  The NGO Cargo 200 documented the deaths of 1,479 Russian citizens fighting as part of the separatist forces. The United States Department of State estimated 400 to 500 of those were regular Russian soldiers. The last prisoner exchange in this phase of the conflict took place on the 16th of April 2020, with the separatists releasing 20 people, including 17 civilians, in exchange for 14 Ukrainian prisoners. At that point, 214 people remained in captivity.

• 3. Russia's Mounting Dead

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  Russia's Ministry of Defence publicly acknowledged only 5,937 soldiers killed by September 2022, a figure that independent researchers universally rejected. The Center for Strategic and International Studies calculated that 60,000 to 70,000 Russian soldiers died in the war's first year. That single year's toll exceeded Russia's combined military deaths in every conflict since World War II. For comparison, the wars in Chechnya had cost Russia between 13,000 and 25,000 soldiers over fifteen years, and Afghanistan another 14,000 to 16,000. By the Center's reckoning, the first year in Ukraine was 25 times deadlier for Russian forces than Chechnya and 35 times more than Afghanistan.

  In June 2022, the Svetlogorsk City Court in Russia's Kaliningrad region ruled that a list of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine constituted classified information. Publishing such a list could be treated as a criminal offense.

  On the 25th of May 2023, Wagner mercenary group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin confirmed publicly that his forces had lost over 20,000 fighters killed. He then accused Russia's Ministry of Defence of systematically concealing its losses. He claimed the overall military toll had reached 120,000 dead by late June 2023.

  BBC News Russian and the Mediazona news outlet spent years building a database from obituaries, cemetery records, and war memorials. They confirmed Russian deaths one by one, using individual names. By the 29th of May 2026, they had documented 223,539 deaths. Their analysis found that 11.4 percent of those killed, roughly 25,295 individuals, were convicts recruited from prisons. Another 8.5 percent, around 18,813, were mobilized soldiers called up after Russia's September 2022 mobilization. Military experts consulted by BBC estimated the documented names accounted for only 45 to 65 percent of actual Russian deaths. That suggested the real toll was between 344,000 and 497,000.

  Buryats, Kalmyks, Tuvans, Chukchi, and Nenets, concentrated in Russia's Far North, Far East, and Siberia, appeared disproportionately in Russian casualty data. These ethnic minority communities suffered overrepresented losses relative to their share of Russia's population. By February 2026, Western officials reported Russia was losing roughly 40,000 soldiers per month while recruiting only around 35,000. Total Russian casualties had by then surpassed 1.25 million, exceeding the total number of American casualties sustained by the United States in World War II.

  On the 10th of March 2026, President Zelenskyy cited Russian intelligence documents placing total Russian military losses at 1,315,000 killed or wounded. He called even that figure understated.

• 4. Ukraine's Military Cost

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  Ukraine reported 10,000 soldiers killed and 30,000 wounded by the start of June 2022, along with 7,200 troops missing. During those weeks, combat deaths ran at between 100 and 200 soldiers per day. President Zelenskyy and his adviser Mykhailo Podolyak confirmed those figures publicly. Davyd Arakhamia, Ukraine's chief negotiator with Russia, told Axios in mid-June that the daily death toll might reach as high as 500. By late July, the rate had fallen sharply, to around 30 killed and 250 wounded per day.

  In February 2024, Ukraine publicly confirmed 31,000 soldiers had been killed in the conflict. Ukraine had been especially secretive about this information, restricting access to demographic data that could be used to estimate its losses. American officials reportedly said Ukraine withheld casualty numbers from even its closest allies. President Zelenskyy later announced 43,000 soldiers killed and 370,000 wounded. He noted that roughly half of the wounded had recovered and returned to active duty. His updated figure, released in mid-February 2025, was over 46,000 killed and 380,000 wounded.

  The UALosses project, launched at the end of 2023, took a different approach to the count. Verified as reliable by Mediazona, Meduza, BBC News Russian, and The Economist, it confirmed deaths and disappearances by individual name. By the 8th of April 2026, it had documented 91,559 Ukrainian fighters killed and 95,165 listed as missing in action. The total of 186,724 dead or missing included non-combat losses alongside battlefield deaths.

  The Dnipropetrovsk Oblast recorded the highest absolute count of confirmed Ukrainian dead or missing, at 18,255. The Kirovohrad Oblast had the highest rate per capita, at 8.086 per 1,000 residents.

  A Wall Street Journal investigation published on the 2nd of August 2023 estimated between 20,000 and 50,000 amputations among Ukrainian military and civilians. By August 2025, Ukraine's National Health Service had recorded 95,000 official amputations on military and civilian patients. Including procedures performed outside Ukraine, the total reached as high as 120,000. By comparison, 41,000 British and 67,000 Germans required amputations during World War One.

  Among the confirmed dead, 7,210 Ukrainian officers had been killed by the 8th of April 2026. That figure nearly matched the 7,147 Russian officers confirmed dead on the opposing side by mid-May.

• 5. The Civilian Price

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  The UN's human rights office recorded 15,850 civilians killed in Ukraine by the 30th of April 2026. Another 44,809 had been injured, bringing confirmed civilian casualties to 60,659. The office noted that its monitoring in Russian-controlled territory remained limited, meaning the true toll was believed to be considerably higher. Of confirmed deaths, 13,172 were caused by explosive weapons designed to affect wide areas, and 472 by mines and unexploded ordnance.

  By March 2022, the Kyiv area had recorded 55 war-related child deaths and Kharkiv another 34. Ukraine's prosecutor general confirmed on the 17th of February 2023 that at least 461 children had been killed and 923 wounded since the invasion began. Most of these child victims were from the Donetsk region.

  The Donetsk Oblast, where fighting was most sustained, recorded more than 28,673 civilian deaths in areas that had been under Ukrainian or formerly Ukrainian control. Yuriy Belousov, Ukraine's chief prosecutor for war crimes, warned in February 2023 that the civilian toll could reach 100,000. Bodies in occupied territory had not been counted. Russia permitted no external monitoring in areas under its control, where civilian deaths were believed to be highest.

  On the 15th of November 2022, missiles struck the Polish border village of Przewodów in Lublin Voivodeship, killing two Polish civilians. On the 25th of December 2024, Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 was shot down and crashed near Aktau, Kazakhstan, killing 38 people. The dead included 25 Azerbaijanis, seven Russians, and six Kazakhs. At least 220 foreign civilians from 27 countries were confirmed killed during the war.

  Estimates of Ukrainian civilians abducted from Russian-occupied territories ranged from 7,000 to 30,000. One organization put the figure as high as 70,000. Many are reported to be held in Russian prisons and penal colonies. Victoria Roshchyna is among those reported to have died in captivity.

• 6. Prisoners and Identification

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  On the 27th of February 2022, Ukraine's ambassador to the United Nations, Sergiy Kyslytsya, contacted the International Committee of the Red Cross. His request was for help identifying and repatriating the bodies of killed Russian soldiers. That same day, the Ukrainian Interior Ministry launched an initiative called Ishchi Svoikh, a phrase meaning Find Your Own. The appeal asked relatives of Russian soldiers to help identify their wounded, captured, or dead. Russia's media regulator blocked the initiative on the day it launched, at the request of Russia's Prosecutor-General's Office.

  On the 12th of March 2022, Ukrainian authorities began using facial recognition technology supplied by Clearview AI to help identify the deceased. Clearview's chief executive claimed the technology could outperform fingerprint matching. A study by the US Department of Energy raised concerns that decomposition might reduce its effectiveness. Ukrainian authorities also contacted the International Commission on Missing Persons, an organization established after the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. It identifies individuals by collecting DNA samples from bodies and cross-matching them against samples provided by surviving families.

  A platoon of the 74th Guards Motor Rifle Brigade, from Russia's Kemerovo Oblast, surrendered to Ukrainian forces in the early weeks of the invasion. The soldiers reportedly said they had not known they were being sent to Ukraine to fight Ukrainians. Ukraine held press conferences featuring captured soldiers speaking against the invasion. Amnesty International noted that Article 13 of the Third Geneva Convention prohibits using prisoners of war in this way. Separately, captured Ukrainian soldiers with British citizenship appeared in videos calling for Boris Johnson to arrange their release. MP Robert Jenrick called the broadcasts on Russia-24 a flagrant breach of the Geneva Convention.

  By December 2024, Russia's Deputy Minister of Defence Anna Tsivilyova reported that 48,000 Russian soldiers were listed as missing in action. Relatives had contributed DNA samples to official search applications. In February 2023, Meduza published an investigation into systemic failures in Russian military record-keeping. These failures made it difficult for families to locate bodies or file compensation claims. Sergey Krivenko, head of the human-rights organization Citizen. Army. Law., estimated that around 24,000 Russian soldiers were missing at that time. Most had been killed but their bodies had not been recovered.

  By the 8th of April 2026, Ukraine had confirmed the release of 6,095 of its soldiers and civilians from Russian custody. Another 4,454 Ukrainians remained confirmed as prisoners of war. A study of Russian prisoners captured by Ukraine found that 55 percent had fought primarily to improve their financial situation. Another 36 percent described ideological motivation.

  In March 2026, TVP World reported on intercepted Russian military messages that Ukrainian intelligence published. According to the Ukrainian Main Directorate of Intelligence, officers in certain Russian units had instructed soldiers to behead killed comrades rather than evacuate their bodies. The heads, along with documents, could then be used to confirm deaths without the logistical demands of removing corpses from combat zones. Ukrainian intelligence identified this as a repeated practice across more than one unit.