The war of attrition between Russia and Ukraine is killing soldiers at a rate not seen in Europe since World War II.
Ukrainian military artillery fire, explosive drones, and mines have killed Russian forces repeatedly charging into no-man's land. As Ukrainian positions are exposed, the country is suffering heavy damage from distant Russian drones, artillery shells, and glide bombs.
Calculating the scale of casualties, and thus the trajectory of the war, is difficult. That information is a national secret of both countries. The Ukrainian government has been particularly secretive, restricting access to demographic data that could be used to estimate losses.
The most complete tally of dead soldiers in Ukraine is carried out by foreign groups with biased or opaque motives.
These groups and other experts believe, based on incomplete information, that Russia has suffered irreplaceable losses in nearly three years of war — casualties that keep soldiers out of combat indefinitely. It is estimated that Ukraine suffered about half of the total.
Russia is still winning. Franz Stefan Gadi, a Vienna-based military analyst, said a much larger population and more effective recruitment allowed it to more effectively compensate for its losses and make gradual progress.
“The fat guys are getting thinner and thinner. But the thin guys are dying,” Gaddy said.
count the dead
The most complete publicly available tally of Ukrainian deaths comes from two opaque websites that track obituaries, posthumous medal awards, funeral announcements, and other death-related information published online. It is obtained.
The websites – Lostarmour.info and UALosses.org – have similar results, each separately counting about 62,000 Ukrainian soldiers who have died since the invasion.
Rostermore and UALosses say they are only able to find a fraction of the soldiers who died because obituaries are delayed and some deaths are never made public. Rostermur estimates that more than 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died in total by December.
By comparison, Russian researchers and journalists have used similar methods to estimate that by the end of November, Russia had suffered more than 150,000 battlefield deaths.
The Rostermore Victims Project is run by about 10 anonymous volunteers, most of them Russian, who scour the internet and collate information to confirm its authenticity. a spokesperson for the website said in an emailed response to questions. The group appears to have sympathies with Russia and seeks to discredit Ukrainian propaganda.
The person claiming to be running UALosses told the New York Times in a message exchange about He said he started. He said he had no ties to Ukraine or Russia and was operating anonymously to avoid legal and personal risks. The Times was unable to verify that personal information.
The Ukrainian government has accused UALosses of “spreading false information” and appears to regularly block the website. Rostermur, like all other websites registered in Russia, is blocked in Ukraine.
A website's secrecy or ideological bias does not necessarily invalidate its findings. Russian independent media outlet Mediazona and Ukrainian non-profit organization Memory Book independently verified some UALosses data by taking random aggregate samples and matching them with online obituaries.
A statistical analysis by The Times of Rostermore's public data found that at least 95 per cent of the group's entries were accurate, with a 95 per cent certainty and a 5 per cent margin of error.
estimate of intelligence
In a rare move, in December a prominent Ukrainian public figure refuted his country's official casualty toll claims.
Independent war correspondent Yuri Butusov tells his 1.2 million YouTube subscribers that sources within the Ukrainian military command estimate that 105,000 soldiers are dead, including 70,000 dead and 35,000 missing. announced that the company had “suffered irreparable loss.” This is far more than the 43,000 soldiers President Volodymyr Zelenskiy claimed to have killed as of December 8th.
Butusov added that this figure does not include units not under the command of the armed forces, such as the National Guard. If that happens, the total number of victims will increase further.
A military analyst familiar with Western government assessments of Ukrainian casualties said Butusov's numbers were reliable. The analysts spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential information.
Western intelligence agencies have been reluctant to release internal calculations of Ukrainian casualties for fear of undermining allies. American officials have previously said Kiev is withholding this information even from its closest allies.
Rare estimates of Ukraine's losses provided by Western officials far exceed Kiev's official figures. In 2023, U.S. officials told the Times that 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed by August of that year. Since then, many of the war's bloodiest battles have been fought.
Mr. Butusov's loss figures do not include serious injuries, an important aspect of the military's fighting ability.
Lack of behavior and statistics
Adding to the ambiguity surrounding Ukrainian casualties is the large number of soldiers declared missing during the fighting.
According to Ukraine's Interior Ministry, around 59,000 Ukrainians were registered as missing in December, most of them soldiers. Butusov said in December that 35,000 military personnel were listed as missing.
A military analyst familiar with the Western assessment said most of the missing Ukrainian soldiers were believed to be dead.
Ukrainian law makes it difficult for relatives of missing men to declare them dead for inheritance or other purposes. This creates a legal purgatory for families who cannot recover loved ones from the battlefield, and keeps the number of victims artificially low.
Alyona Bondar, a Ukrainian cafe worker, said she had not received any information about her brother, a soldier, since he went missing on a battlefield in southern Ukraine in 2023.
“It's better to tell the truth, including for my brother's sake,” she said in a phone interview. “It would be better for him to have a grave to visit than for him to lie somewhere in a field for a year and a half.”
Combat deaths are only one aspect of military attrition. A more comprehensive measure is the total number of irreparable losses, deaths and serious injuries that prevent soldiers from fighting again.
what it means
Taken together, this estimate, along with its caveats and shortcomings, leads analysts to conclude that Russia will kill or seriously injure slightly fewer than two soldiers for every Ukrainian fighter who suffers the same fate.
At this rate, Ukraine could not overcome Russia's demographic and recruitment advantages. On current trends, Ukraine is losing a larger share of its small army.
More than 400,000 Russians are currently facing around 250,000 Ukrainians on the front lines, and the gap between the two armies is widening, according to military analysts familiar with Western assessments.
Russia will rebuild and even expand its ravaged invasion force by leveraging a population four times larger than Ukraine and conducting its first military conscription since World War II, recruiting felons and debtors. I was able to do that. Russia's dictatorial President Vladimir V. Putin's government has increased incentives for new recruits and recently started pressuring criminal suspects to join in exchange for dropping charges.
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These recruitment efforts resulted in Russia acquiring between 600 and 1,000 new fighters a day last year, according to Russian financial statistics. Kiev only matched this percentage during that period.
North Korea also sent about 11,000 soldiers to support Moscow's forces in Russia's southern Kursk region, whose territory was captured by Ukrainian forces last summer.
Mr. Zelenskiy has to contend with public opinion, so the government has delayed submitting an unpopular draft law and is struggling to implement it. Some men go into hiding to avoid the draft or bribe draft officials to obtain exemptions. Due to delays in recruiting Ukrainian prisoners, only a small proportion of the fighters were recruited from Russian prisons.
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Recruitment gaps ultimately shape the battlefield.
Russia is losing more soldiers. But the more Ukrainian casualties there are, the closer the Kremlin moves to victory.
Daria Mitiuk and Yury Sivara contributed reporting from Oleg Matznev from Kiev and Berlin.
