Even as President Vladimir V. Putin hails Russia’s advances on the battlefield, four years into his invasion of Ukraine, his force has suffered perhaps the worst losses any major power has seen in a conflict since World War II.
There is little sign that the conflict is getting any less deadly, as Ukraine looks to harness new battlefield technology to raise the cost of Russia’s gains. Estimates suggest that the death toll for the entire war among both Russian and Ukrainian fighters could rise beyond half a million this year, with deaths adding up particularly on the advancing Russian side.
The number of soldiers killed in the war remains a heavily guarded secret on both sides, as Moscow and Kyiv aim to avoid projecting weakness.
Some estimates indicate that Ukraine has lost more soldiers as a proportion of its wartime population than Russia has, even if Russian losses have been far larger overall. Estimates put the number of Russian troops killed at more than five times the losses that the U.S. military suffered during the Vietnam War.
Journalists from the independent Russian news outlet Mediazona and the BBC Russian Service published new results on Tuesday of their effort, dating to the early months of the invasion, to compile the number of Russian soldiers who have died. Their count is based on verified names in obituaries, cemetery burials, social media reports from relatives, probate records and other Russian state data.
The outlets updated their tally of verified Russian deaths to 200,186 but emphasized that the figure “remains a conservative floor, not a ceiling.” They identified nearly 27,000 Russian cities, towns and villages that sent soldiers to Ukraine who were ultimately killed.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies, based in Washington, recently said that Russia had suffered up to 325,000 deaths on the battlefield. The number appears to be a reasonable projection, given the confirmed numbers from Mediazona and the BBC Russian Service, which do not fully capture battlefield deaths from 2025 and 2026.
“No major power has suffered anywhere near these number of casualties since the Second World War,” said Seth Jones, a co-author of the C.S.I.S. study, noting that one exception could be Chinese losses during the Korean War, though estimates from that conflict vary widely. “It is just short of shocking.”
The center’s study estimated the number of wounded and killed on the Russian side, often referred to together as casualties, to be as many as 1.2 million.
On Tuesday, Mr. Putin marked the fourth anniversary of the war with a speech to the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B. He said that the Russian intelligence service needed to do more to protect the Russian homeland from Ukrainian attacks. A day earlier, Mr. Putin met with widows of fallen soldiers at the Kremlin.
In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered an address highlighting Ukrainians’ perseverance, hosted senior European leaders in Kyiv, and visited a makeshift memorial in the capital’s central square, where he said he hoped that President Trump would visit the country to see its suffering.
The authorities in Ukraine, like Russian officials, have been secretive about army losses. Ukraine has restricted access to demographic data that could help estimate the number of Ukrainians killed in action, and it has released casualty figures in the tens of thousands that most observers consider understated.
The C.S.I.S. report estimated that between 500,000 and 600,000 Ukrainian troops have been wounded, have been killed or have gone missing since the start of the war. The report said that between 100,000 and 140,000 of those were fatalities, roughly two to three times higher than figures released by Mr. Zelensky earlier this month.
Kyiv has struggled to make up for losses as its army conscription system fallsbehind and desertions further strain manpower. Ukrainian officers say they cannot properly man their defensive lines as a consequence.
By contrast, Russia has largely managed to replace its losses with a recruitment system that relies on big enlistment bonuses and signing up convicts. Russia’s wartime population is also more than four times that of Ukraine.
“The big issue the Ukrainians face is numbers right now,” said Mr. Jones, the co-author of the C.S.I.S. study. “There is no question about it.”
To offset this disadvantage,Ukraine has sought to inflict losses on enemy forces at a rate equal to or greater than what Russia can replace. While that goal proved elusive for much of the war, Ukrainian and European officials say the balance may now be shifting.
In January, 225 Russian soldiers were wounded or killed for each square mile of territory seized, according to the Institute for the Study of War.
Mykhailo Fedorov, the Ukrainian defense minister, said that Ukraine had killed or seriously wounded 35,000 Russian soldiers in December. That is about as much as Russia’s average monthly recruitment last year, based on data released by Russian officials.
Mr. Fedorov said Ukraine aimed to raise the number of Russian losses to 50,000 per month. “The objective is to impose costs on Russia that it cannot bear,” he told reporters in January.
Paul Sonne is an international correspondent, focusing on Russia and the varied impacts of President Vladimir V. Putin’s domestic and foreign policies, with a focus on the war against Ukraine.
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