The war between Russia and Ukraine is killing soldiers at a rate not seen in Europe since World War II.
Ukrainian artillery fire, explosive drones and landmines kill Russian troops as they repeatedly attack no-man’s land. As Ukrainian positions are exposed, heavy casualties are inflicted by long-range Russian drones, missiles and glide bombs.
Calculating the scale of casualties, and therefore the trajectory of the war, is difficult: The information is a state secret in both countries. The Ukrainian government has been particularly secretive, limiting access to demographic data that could be used to calculate its losses.
The most complete count of dead Ukrainian soldiers is carried out by groups abroad with non-objective and non-transparent motives.
Working with incomplete data, these groups and other experts estimate that Ukraine has suffered about half of Russia’s irreparable losses — the deaths and injuries that put soldiers out of action indefinitely — in the nearly three-year-old war.
Russia still wins. Its larger population and more effective recruitment made it possible to replace losses said Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based military analyst.
“A fat man loses weight. But the thin man dies,” said Mr. Gady.
Counting the dead
The most complete publicly available reports on Ukrainian deaths come from two opaque websites that track obituaries, posthumous medals, obituaries and other death-related information posted online.
Websites – Lostarmour.info and UALosses.org — gave similar results: Each separately counted about 62,000 Ukrainian soldiers who died after the invasion.
Lostarmour and UALosses say they can only find some of the dead soldiers because obituaries are published late and some deaths are never reported. Lostarmour estimates that a total of over 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers died by December.
For comparison, Russian researchers and journalists used similar methods to make such calculations in Russia More than 150,000 died on the battlefield until the end of November.
Lostarmour’s victims project is run by about 10 anonymous volunteers, most of whom are Russian, who scour the Internet and cross-check information to verify its authenticity, a website spokesman said in an emailed response to questions. The group appears to be sympathetic to Russia and seeks to discredit Ukrainian propaganda.
The man who claims to run UALosses, in a message exchange on X, told The New York Times that he is an IT expert based in a Western country who started his project to address the public knowledge gap. He said he has no ties to Ukraine or Russia and operates anonymously to avoid legal and personal risk. The Times has not been able to verify these personal details.
The Ukrainian government has accused UALosses of “spreading false information” and appears to block its website from time to time. Lostarmour is blocked in Ukraine, like all other sites registered in Russia.
The privacy or ideological bias of websites does not necessarily invalidate their findings. Independent Russian media Mediazona and Ukrainian non-profit organization Memory book They examined some UALosses data separately by taking random number samples and matching them with online obituaries.
A Times statistical analysis of Lostarmour’s public data showed that 97 percent of the group’s entries were accurate with 95 percent confidence, with a 5 percent margin of error.
Intelligence estimates
In a rare move, a prominent Ukrainian public figure denied his claims in December the country’s official loss claims.
Independent war correspondent Yuri Butusov announced to his 1.2 million YouTube subscribers Sources at the headquarters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine told him that 105,000 soldiers were “irretrievably lost”, 70,000 dead and 35,000 missing. It is much more than that President Vladimir Zelensky claimed that 43,000 soldiers were killed from December 8.
Mr. Butusov added that his figure excludes units outside the command of the Armed Forces, such as the National Guard. This will further increase the number of total casualties.
A military analyst familiar with Western governments’ assessments of Ukrainian losses said Mr. Butusov’s figures were reliable. The analyst discussed sensitive information on condition of anonymity.
Western intelligence agencies are reluctant to release internal estimates of Ukrainian casualties for fear of undermining an ally. American officials have previously said that Kiev is hiding this information even from its closest allies.
Rare estimates of Ukrainian casualties given by Western officials far exceeded the official figures from Kiev. US officials told The Times in 2023 By August of that year, 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died. Many of the bloodiest battles of the war have been fought since then.
Mr. Butusov’s casualty figure excludes serious injuries, an important aspect of the military’s combat capability.
Missing in action and statistics
Adding to the confusion over Ukraine’s losses is the large number of soldiers it has declared missing in action.
According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, about 59,000 Ukrainians were registered as missing in December, most of them military personnel. Mr. Butusov said in December that 35,000 servicemen of the Armed Forces are on the list of missing persons.
A military analyst familiar with Western assessments said that the vast majority of missing Ukrainian soldiers are believed to be dead.
Ukrainian law makes it difficult for relatives of missing men to declare them dead for inheritance or other purposes. This kept the death toll artificially low, creating a legal purgatory for families whose loved ones were not removed from the battlefield.
Ukrainian cafe worker Alyona Bondar said that she did not receive any information about her brother, a soldier who went missing on the battlefield in the south of Ukraine in 2023.
“It would be better to tell the truth, including for my brother’s sake,” he said in a phone interview. “It would be better to have a grave to visit than to lie somewhere in a field for a year and a half.”
Battle deaths are only one aspect of military attrition. A more comprehensive measure is irreparable or irreversible casualties: the total number of deaths and serious injuries that prevent a soldier from returning to combat.
What does it mean?
Combining the estimates with their own caveats and shortcomings, analysts conclude that Russia suffers slightly fewer military deaths and serious injuries for every Ukrainian fighter who suffers the same fate.
This ratio did not allow Ukraine to overcome Russian population and recruitment advantages. In current trends, Ukraine is losing a larger part of its small army.
According to a military analyst familiar with Western estimates, there are currently more than 400,000 Russians on the front line, facing about 250,000 Ukrainians, and the gulf between the armies is growing.
Russia was able to rebuild and even expand its battered occupation forces by carrying out its first conscription since World War II and rounding up criminals and debtors, touching a population four times the size of Ukraine. The government of Russia’s autocratic president, Vladimir V. Putin paying increased bonuses to new hiresand recently started printing conscription of persons accused of crimes in exchange for dropping the charges.
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According to Russian financial statistics, these recruitment efforts brought 600 to 1,000 new fighters to Russia a day last year. Kyiv adapted this indicator only for a short period of time.
North Korea too He sent about 11 thousand soldiers To assist Moscow’s forces in the Kursk region of southern Russia, where the Ukrainians seized territory last summer.
Mr. Zelenskiy’s need to fight public opinion led his government to delay the unpopular project and then struggle to implement it. Some men have it he went into hiding to avoid military serviceor a bribe draft officers to obtain exemption. Employment of convicts in Ukraine is delayed It produced a small number of fighters who were conscripted from Russian prisons.
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The hiring gap ultimately shapes the battlefield.
Russia is losing more men. But every Ukrainian loss brings the Kremlin closer to victory.
Daria Mitiuk and Yuri Shivala He prepared a report from Kiev and Oleg Matsnev From Berlin.
