Whether the Russian invasion of Ukraine is in the headlines or not, the war just keeps grinding on. Last month, British intelligence updated its estimates of the total number of casualties suffered by Russia — killed, wounded and missing — to 1.5 million troops since February 2022. Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, chief of the U.K. defense staff, noted that most of the losses occurred since January 2023, and in that time, Russia gained just 2 percent of Ukrainian territory.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated this summer that Russia had suffered as many as 450,000 battlefield deaths over the course of the war. A February 2026 estimate indicated Ukraine had suffered 250,000 to 300,000 military casualties, combined killed and wounded.
For perspective, in the roughly two decades of the Vietnam War, the U.S. casualties came to 58,220 killed, 303,704 wounded and 1,584 missing in action.
Clearly, Russian forces could use a morale boost, and last month the Russian Orthodox Church pitched in. Church officials sent relics including a piece of the right hand of Dmitry Donskoy to the front. The relics had been discovered this summer during restoration work in the Kremlin’s Archangel Cathedral. Donskoy was a prince celebrated in Russia for his victory over Mongol forces at the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380; the Russian Orthodox Church canonized him as a saint in 1988.
The Moscow Patriarchate’s military department — “the Synodal Department for Cooperation with the Armed Forces and Law Enforcement Agencies” — announced on Sept. 8, “Right now, a reliquary containing a particle of the relics of the holy and faithful Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy is en route to the front line. … The holy commander is heading to where the fate of the Fatherland is being decided today, to invisibly stand in battle formation with our defenders.”
It’s tempting to scoff at the notion that an army of invaders who commit atrocities with metronomic regularity would take inspiration from a Christian relic, even it is supposedly from a warrior prince’s sword-wielding hand. But put that aside for a moment, because now it appears Russian troops … lost Dmitry Donskoy’s hand fragment.
The Moscow Times, a news site covering Russia from Amsterdam after being driven out of Russia, reported on Oct. 1 that two pro-war Telegram channels in Russia had described retreating troops as abandoning the Donskoy relics.
Unsurprisingly, church authorities insist that Donskoy’s relics are doing just fine. Spokesman Vakhtang Kipshidze told the state-owned domestic news agency RIA Novosti, “Reports have surfaced on social media that a particle of Dmitry Donskoy’s relics was lost in the area of a special military operation. This is a fabrication, and it is being spread, presumably, with anti-church intent.” Military officials haven’t commented.
Of course, no one is posting recent pictures of the relics from the front, so neither side’s claim is easy to verify.
We do know that Ukraine’s Operation Vivaldi has retaken about 68 square miles around Lyman in the northern Donetsk oblast and captured 250 Russian troops. And it’s the front of a hard-fought war with constant drone bombardments; the notion of Russian troops coming under fire during a prayer service and abandoning the relics, as one report had it, is entirely plausible.
If you bring a saint’s hand fragment to the front in a war of aggression, and within a few weeks, the enemy’s attack just happens to be in the right place and at the right time and forces your guys to retreat, and they leave the hand behind … is it possible God is trying to tell you something? Maybe, just maybe, the Creator is not on board with your more than 3,000 attacks on hospitals and other health care facilities during the war? The more than 3,900 Ukrainian children reportedly killed or injured during the war? The systematic abduction and forcible transfer, according to the United Nations, of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia and Belarus?
And if the presence of a holy relic on the battlefield is supposed to be such a great inspiration, how should Russian soldiers interpret its loss?
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