Russia’s death toll has surpassed 200,000, Kyiv’s military said on Wednesday, but the updated figure also raises questions about the losses sustained by Ukraine as its forces prepare a counteroffensive.
Both Russia and Ukraine say little about their own losses and casualty estimates vary widely. But it is likely that Ukraine too has suffered high casualties in the grinding, near 15-month-old conflict.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that minimizing further casualties in his country’s armed forces is a high priority for him and is one of the reasons why Kyiv’s much-anticipated counteroffensive has been delayed.
“It is very difficult to determine casualties in an ongoing conflict since both sides will try to keep the data secret and inflate the number of adversary casualties,” Marina Miron, a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, U.K., told Newsweek.
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“Often these are used in order to send a message to the adversary and their constituent population. In other words, it is a psychological trick to negatively affect and undermine the social cohesion of the adversary by inflating their casualty figures,” Miron said.
“For Kyiv, publishing such figures would be unwise given that this would provide the Russians with the idea about the force numbers Ukraine has left and this would probably also undermine the mobilization if people see that there is little chance of survival,” she added.
Miron also pointed out that it was important to bear in mind the relative size of the two sides’ armed forces. “Ten thousand casualties for Ukraine are not the same as 10,000 casualties for Russia given that Russia has a much larger force,” she said.
According to Ukraine’s estimates, Russia’s invasion forces passed a grim milestone this week. Moscow’s forces have lost 200,590 fighters since the start of full-scale war on February 24, 2022, the Ukrainian General Staff said in a post to social media on Wednesday. This was an increase of 610 troops from the previous day.
Russia does not provide a running count for its losses in Ukraine, and the most recent update from the Defense Ministry came in September. At this point, the Kremlin put the death toll for Russia’s forces at 5,937 troops.
Ukraine’s estimates of Russian casualties typically come in higher than Western figures, which nonetheless show heavy death tolls for Moscow. The White House said in early May that Russia’s military had likely suffered around 100,000 casualties since December, including 20,000 troops killed.
Little is also known about Ukraine’s casualty count. In late August, Ukraine’s top soldier, General Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, said almost 9,000 Ukrainian fighters had been killed at that point.
A leaked document from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency which circulated online in April 2023 suggested that Ukraine had sustained between 124,000 and 131,000 total casualties.
Up to 113,500 had been wounded in action, the document said, with up to 17,500 killed during fighting.
The leaks also suggested Russia had suffered up to 223,000 total casualties, with up to 43,000 killed. Back in February 2023, the British Defense Ministry said Russian forces and mercenaries had likely had 40,000-60,000 soldiers killed, with up to 200,000 total casualties since February 2022.
Russia’s Defense Ministry does not publish daily updates on Ukraine’s total reported death toll. However, on Wednesday, the ministry said 360 Ukrainian “Ukrainian servicemen and mercenaries” had been killed in the previous 24 hours in the Donetsk direction, plus an additional 375 fighters in other parts of south and eastern Ukraine.
Back in November, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, said Russia had likely sustained “well over” 100,000 casualties. “Same thing probably on the Ukrainian side,” he added.
In March 2023, Milley labelled the eastern Donetsk city of Bakhmut, which has seen months of some of the war’s most bitter fighting, a “slaughter-fest” for Russia’s forces. But the city, considered an epicenter of the violence of the ongoing war, is also believed to have cost Ukraine dearly.
Ukrainian forces in the destroyed city are working for the “absolute exhaustion” of Russian fighters, according to Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s Eastern Grouping of Forces, cited in Ukrainian media on Monday.
Earlier this month, Zelensky suggested in an interview given to several media outlets that Ukraine may be successful in launching a counteroffensive immediately, “but we’d lose a lot of people.”
“I think that’s unacceptable,” he added, saying the armed forces “still need a bit more time.”
Newsweek has reached out to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry for comment via email.