Russian Losses Getting Worse Despite March Drop: UK

Russian average daily losses dipped throughout March, but Moscow’s casualties per day have increased each year since it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to a new assessment.

Russian losses sat at 913 a day throughout March 2024, a drop of 74 on average per day from the previous month, the British Defense Ministry said in an intelligence update posted to social media on Sunday.

However, since Russian troops crossed over into Ukraine, sparking all-out war in the country, “each year has seen a rise in the daily average loss rate” for Russian troops, the U.K. government said.

The figure stood at 400 in 2022, jumping to 693 in 2023, and reaching 913 for the first three months of 2024, according to the British ministry. “The increase reflects Russia’s ongoing reliance on mass to sustain pressure on Ukrainian front lines.”

Casualty counts and equipment losses in war are notoriously difficult to pin down, and Western experts suggest both Kyiv’s and Moscow’s reported losses are higher than the true figure. Neither side offers regular updates on their own losses.

Ukraine’s military said on Sunday that Russia had lost a total of 447,510 fighters since February 2022.

Newsweek has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment via email.

If Ukraine’s tally includes overall casualties, as well as Russian fighters who are missing or died in non-combat circumstances, it is a “perfectly plausible” figure, Nick Reynolds, a research fellow for land warfare at the London-based Royal United Services Institute think tank, told Newsweek in February.

Casualty counts typically spike during drawn-out battles, such as when Russia launched its offensive on the strategic Donetsk city of Avdiivka in October. Moscow has controlled the now-decimated settlement since mid-February.

The drop in Russian losses in March 2024 is tied to fewer Russian attacks since it captured Avdiivka, building in a rest period for its troops and a desire to pull down casualty counts ahead of the Russian elections held in the middle of last month, the U.K. government assessed.

The British Defense Ministry had said in March that Russia’s monthly casualty count in February was the highest of the full-scale war. On March 3, the U.K. government estimated that Russia’s daily rate of losses had reached 983, adding that between February 2022 and the start of March 2024, Moscow had likely sustained more than 335,000 casualties.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said in mid-March that Ukraine had sustained approximately 71,000 casualties since January 2024.

This was very similar to the Russian casualty figures put forward by Ukraine’s military—Kyiv’s tally at the time put the Kremlin’s casualties at approximately 72,000 since the start of the year.