The Kremlin is denying reports that Russia has inflicted the heaviest casualties of any major power in any conflict since World War II during the current war in Ukraine.
The Washington DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies released a report on Tuesday that Russia Between February 2022 and December 2025, it claimed 1.2 million casualties, including up to 325,000 soldiers. The report also warned that the number of soldiers killed, injured or missing on both sides of Russia’s war on Ukraine could reach into the millions.
“Despite claims of battlefield expansion in Ukraine, the data show that Russia is paying extraordinary prices for small gains and declining as a major power,” the report said. “Not since World War II has there been such a large force of casualties or deaths in any war.”
Commenting on the report, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that the study could not be considered “reliable information” and that only the Russian Defense Ministry was authorized to provide information on military casualties.
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Neither Moscow nor Kiev provide up-to-date information on military losses, and each side seeks to highlight the other side’s losses.
The Russian ministry’s latest update on battlefield casualties was in September 2022, when fewer than 6,000 Russian soldiers had been killed. It has not released any updated figures since then.
There has been no comment from the Ukrainian government. The new report estimates that Ukraine, with its small army and population, has suffered between 500,000 and 600,000 military casualties and up to 140,000 dead.
In an interview with NBC in February 2025, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that more than 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since the war began.
The report estimates that the combined Russian and Ukrainian casualties could reach 1.8 million. The war in
The figures from CSIS were compiled using the think tank’s own analysis, data published by the independent Russian news site Mediazona and the BBC, UK government estimates and interviews with government officials.
Activists and independent journalists say reports of military casualties have been suppressed in the Russian media.
MediaZona, together with the BBC and a group of volunteers, has so far collected the names of more than 160,000 soldiers killed in news reports, social media and government websites.
North Korea has deployed troops to Ukraine as part of its strategic partnership with Russia. By April 2025, South Korean intelligence estimated that at least 600 North Korean soldiers had died.
Reports suggest that Russia is slowly advancing
While Russia’s forces are vastly larger since it took the initiative on the battlefield in 2024, Russia’s forces are advancing at a slower pace, the CSIS report said.
Russia’s advance in Ukraine has largely descended into a vicious war of attrition, and analysts say Russian President Vladimir Putin is in no rush to settle even as his army faces problems along nearly 1,000 kilometers of its front line.
Trilateral talks between Russia, Ukraine and the United States are set to resume in Abu Dhabi on February 1 to reach a resolution on the war in Ukraine, Russia’s Interfax news agency reported on Wednesday, citing the Kremlin.
The first round of trilateral talks to end the four-year war took place last weekend at the same venue.
According to the report, the Russian military has made an average of 15 to 70 meters of progress per day in its known attacks.
This is “slower than almost any other war in the last century,” the report said.
Putin told his annual press conference last month that 700,000 Russian troops are fighting in Ukraine. In the year It gave the same number in 2024 and a slightly lower number – 617,000 – in December 2023. Those numbers could not be verified.
Two people were killed and at least nine others wounded near the capital, Ukrainian officials said on Wednesday.
A man and a woman were killed in an overnight attack in the Bilohorodka area on the outskirts of Kiev, said Mykola Kalashnik, head of the region’s military administration.
Read the CSIS think tank report:
In the Ukrainian cities of Odesa and Krivy Rih, as well as in the Zaporizhia region, Russia said overnight attacks wounded at least nine people and destroyed infrastructure.
The Ukrainian Air Force said that Russia attacked one ballistic missile and 146 drones overnight, 103 of which were shot down by electronic warfare.
On the other hand, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that its air defenses had destroyed 75 Ukrainian drones. 24 were shot dead in Russia’s southwestern Krasnodar region, and 23 were shot on the Crimean peninsula, which Russia illegally annexed in 2016.
Two drones were reportedly shot down in Russia’s Voronezh region, and Ukraine’s Chief of General Staff on Wednesday attacked the Khokholskaya oil depot. The head of the region, Alexander Gusev, wrote in a telegram that the wreckage of the downed drone sparked a fire related to oil production, but did not provide further details.