The civil war between Russia and Ukraine is killing soldiers at a rate not seen in Europe since World War II.
Ukrainian artillery fire, exploding drones and mines are killing Russian soldiers, as they repeatedly attack the no-man’s land. As the Ukrainian positions are exposed, they face serious threats from afar by Russian drones, shells and glide bombs.
Calculating the death toll, and therefore the war’s toll, is difficult: The information is a state secret in both countries. The Ukrainian government has been largely secretive, limiting access to public information that could be used to quantify its losses.
The most complete statistics of dead Ukrainian soldiers are made by international groups with biased or unclear motives.
Working with incomplete information, experts estimate that Ukraine has suffered nearly half of Russia’s irreparable losses – deaths and injuries that put soldiers out of combat forever – in the nearly three-year-old war.
Russia is still winning. Its large population and efficient recruitment have allowed it to replace losses effectively, and advance slowly, said Franz-Stefan Gady, a military analyst based in Vienna.
“Fat is getting thinner. But a thin man dies,” said Mr. Gady.
Counting the dead
The most comprehensive publicly available statistics of Ukrainian deaths come from two obscure websites that track obituaries, medal awards, funeral announcements and other death-related information published online.
The websites – Lostarmour.info and UALlosses.org – produced similar results: Each listed 62,000 Ukrainian soldiers dead since the attack.
Lostarmour and UALosses say they can only find some dead soldiers, because obituaries are published with delay, and some deaths are never announced at all. Lostarmour estimates that more than 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died by December, in total.
By comparison, Russian researchers and journalists used similar methods to estimate that Russia had killed more than 150,000 people on the battlefield by the end of November.
The Lostarmour Injury Project is run by about 10 anonymous volunteers, mostly Russians, who scour the Internet and check information to verify its authenticity, a spokesperson for the website said in an emailed response to questions. This group appears to be sympathetic to Russia and wants to discredit Ukrainian propaganda.
The person who claims to run UALosses told the New York Times in a text message interview on X that he is an IT professional based in a Western country who started his project to address the public information gap. He said he has no ties to Ukraine or Russia and works anonymously to avoid legal and personal risk. The Times could not verify that personal information.
The Ukrainian government has accused UALosses of “spreading false information,” and appears to block the website from time to time. Lostarmour is blocked in Ukraine, like all other websites registered in Russia.
The privacy of the websites or the bias of opinions does not make their findings. Independent Russian media agency Mediazona and non-profit Ukrainian Memory Book separately verified some of the UALosses data by taking random statistical samples and matching them with online obituaries.
A statistical analysis by the Times of Lostarmour’s public data found that 97 percent of the team’s entries were accurate with 95 percent confidence, with a margin of error of 5 percent.
Intelligence measures
In a rare move, a prominent Ukrainian figure in December contested his country’s claim for legal damages.
Freelance military journalist Yurii Butusov announced to his 1.2 million YouTube subscribers that sources inside the headquarters of the Ukrainian Armed Forces told him that 105,000 soldiers were “irretrievably lost,” including 70,000 killed and 35,000 missing. That’s far more than the 43,000 soldiers President Volodymyr Zelensky says have been killed since December 8.
Mr Butusov added that his figure does not include units outside the command of the Armed Forces, such as the National Guard. This will further increase the death toll.
A military analyst familiar with Western governments’ assessments of casualties in Ukraine said Mr Butusov’s numbers were credible. The analyst discussed sensitive information on condition of anonymity.
Western intelligence agencies have been reluctant to reveal their internal figures for Ukrainian casualties for fear of undermining their colleagues. US officials have said that Kyiv is withholding this information from even its closest allies.
Rough estimates of Ukraine’s losses given by Western officials far exceeded Kyiv’s official figures. US officials told The Times in 2023 that 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died by August of that year. Many bloodiest battles have been fought since then.
The amount of loss of Mr. Butusov does not include serious injuries, an important aspect of the combat ability of the army.
It is not in action, nor in figures
Adding to the crisis surrounding Ukrainian casualties is the large number of soldiers who have been declared missing.
About 59,000 Ukrainians were registered as missing in December, most of them soldiers, according to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry. Mr. Butusov said in December 35,000 members of the Armed Forces were listed as missing.
A military analyst familiar with the Western assessment said most of the 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 has created an official purge of families whose loved ones have not been found on the battlefield, keeping the death toll artificially low.
Alyona Bondar, a Ukrainian shop worker, said she had not received any information about her brother, a soldier, since he went missing on the battlefield in southern Ukraine in 2023.
“It would be better to tell the truth, including my brother,” he said in a phone interview. It would be better to have a grave for me to visit, instead of him lying somewhere in the field for a year and a half.
Death in war is just one aspect of military decline. A broad measure is irreversible, or irreparable loss: the cumulative number of deaths and serious injuries that prevent a soldier from fighting again.
What does it mean
Combining these estimates, along with their assumptions and shortcomings, analysts conclude that Russia is losing a little less than two percent of its soldiers killed and seriously wounded in the entire war in Ukraine that suffer the same fate.
This measure did not allow Ukraine to overcome Russian population and recruitment advantages. In the current situation, Ukraine is losing a large part of its small army.
There are currently more than 400,000 Russians against about 250,000 Ukrainians at the front, and the gap between the forces is widening, according to a military analyst familiar with Western assessments.
Russia has been able to rebuild and expand its assault force by enlisting a population four times larger than Ukraine’s, forming its first draft since World War II and including criminals and debtors. The government of Russia’s dictatorial president, Vladimir V. Putin, pays increasing stipends to new recruits, and recently began pressuring people accused of crimes to sign up for expungements.
These recruitment efforts brought Russia between 600 and 1,000 new fighters a day last year, according to Russian financial statistics. Kyiv matched this level for a short period of time.
North Korea has also sent about 11,000 troops to help Moscow’s forces in the Kursk region of southern Russia, where the Ukrainians captured the area last summer.
Mr Zelensky’s need to buck public opinion has led his government to delay the unpopular draft, then abandon it and struggle to implement it. Some men have gone into hiding to avoid conscription, or they have betrayed conscription officers to gain an exemption. Ukraine’s long-term recruitment of prisoners has produced a small proportion of the soldiers who were registered in Russian prisons.
The hiring gap ultimately shapes the battlefield.
Russia is losing a lot of men. But every dead Ukrainian cuts the Kremlin closer to victory.
Daria Mitiuk, Yurii Shyvala again Oleksandra Mykolyshyn contributed to reporting from Kyiv and Oleg Matsnev from Berlin.
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