About 900,000 Russian soldiers have been wounded or killed since the start of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, the UK’s Defense Ministry wrote in a statement on Thursday.
“Of these, it is likely 200,000 to 250,000 Russian soldiers have been killed, Russia’s largest losses since the Second World War,” the ministry wrote.
The statement said the Kremlin is likely prepared to continue suffering a high rate of losses, contingent on two factors: public support for the war and how easily those losses can be replaced.
“Russian President Putin and the Russian military leadership highly likely prioritize their conflict objectives over the lives of Russian soldiers,” the ministry wrote.
The ministry’s estimates tend to mirror those of Ukraine’s public tallies. Kyiv said on Thursday that it estimated close to 900,000 Russian troops were wounded or killed in the war.
The UK Defense Ministry did not provide further information or analyses about Russian war casualties.
The Russian Defense Ministry did not respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.
An estimate in January from Lloyd Austin, who was US Defense Secretary at the time, put Russia’s wounded and killed at around 700,000.
Meanwhile, over 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers have likely been wounded or killed. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in February that about 46,000 of his troops were killed while about 380,000 were wounded.
UA Losses, an open-source research site that calculates war losses based on news articles and social media posts, estimates that around 65,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed while another 55,000 are missing.
How Russia’s losses affect its economy
Both Ukraine and Russia have struggled to replenish their forces as the war drags past its third year. Kyiv is expanding its criteria for eligible draftees, while Moscow is pouring money into contracts to entice new soldiers to sign up.
The Kremlin managed to raise recruitment rates in the second half of 2024, but it’s spending nearly a third of its entire federal budget on defense.
A steady supply of able bodies on the battlefield has been key for Russia’s main strategy for the last year or so, which involves deploying mass infantry assaults to exhaust Ukraine. It’s a costly tactic that has brought limited results on the eastern front, though it helped to gradually push Ukraine out of Kursk in the north.
“RF has been dealing with a degree of matériel exhaustion after high loss rates in the fall,” wrote Michael Kofman, a senior defense-focused analyst at the Carnegie Endowment Fund, in a summary on Thursday.
“But current RF contract rates continue to provide replacements and enable rotations,” Kofman added, referring to the Russian armed forces.
Some Russian industries are also facing an intense labor shortage of about 5 million total workers, brought on partially by mass military recruitment and a brain drain of wealthier Russians who left at the war’s start.
Business leaders highlighted those shortages in a meeting on Tuesday with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Some asked for further federal investment and floated the idea of restricting part-time work in favor of full-time jobs, according to a speech by Alexander Shokhin, president of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs.
Their meeting was held against the backdrop of Moscow’s negotiations with the Trump administration, which have raised hopes that the Russian economy may receive some form of sanctions relief and an easier path to recovery.
But Putin sought to temper those expectations at the meeting, telling business owners not to think of sanctions as temporary but as “systemic, strategic pressure” on their country.
“Let me repeat: sanctions and restrictions are the reality of today’s new stage of development, which the entire world, the entire world economy, has entered,” Putin said.
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