Casualties Have Reached About 1.8M Since Start of Invasion, New Study Says

A new study from a US think tank has found that military casualties from the Kremlin’s nearly four-year unprovoked invasion have approached two million, with the invaders suffering the lion’s share of those dead and injured. The number represents soldiers either killed in action, wounded, or missing.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies announced on Tuesday that its analysts have found that Moscow’s troops have suffered 1.2 million casualties, with about 325,000 dead. 

This roughly coincides with Kyiv’s official estimate of 1.24 Russian casualties, a figure that is updated daily at the top of Kyiv Post’s homepage.

“Combined Russian and Ukrainian casualties may be as high as 1.8 million and could reach 2 million total casualties by the spring of 2026,” the think tank wrote in its report.

“No major power has suffered anywhere near these numbers of casualties or fatalities in any war since World War II,” CSIS analysts wrote.

The study’s stated goal was to measure the success of Moscow’s campaign in Ukraine. The introduction reads:

“A close look at the data suggests that Russia is hardly winning and, even more interestingly, that Russia is increasingly a declining power. To better understand the state of the war and Russia’s battlefield performance, this analysis asks: How successful has the Russian military been in achieving the Kremlin’s main objectives? 

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“To answer these questions, this assessment examines several indicators of Russia’s battlefield performance: fatality and casualty rates, the relative rate of advance of Russian forces, and the size of Russian territorial gains.”

The number of Ukrainian casualties was estimated to be about half those of the invading forces, with between 500,000 and 600,000 casualties, of which between 100,000 and 140,000 were killed.

The BBC’s Russian service and the Mediazona outlet,  whose teams comb through public records such as death notices, have been able to verify only about 163,000 Russian soldiers killed in four years of war, while admitting that the real number is probably higher.

By policy, the Kremlin does not disclose its numbers of killed or wounded Russian soldiers. 

Kyiv’s official figures of its own dead and wounded traditionally have been lower than international estimates. In February 2025, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office said the total number of Ukrainian dead and wounded was about 46,000 after what was then three years of war.

Ukrainian civilians have also suffered terrible losses from Russian strikes and outright massacres.

More than 2,500 civilians were killed and more than 12,000 Ukrainian civilians were wounded in 2025 alone, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said, noting that the UN has verified almost 15,000 civilian deaths since 2022, but that the total “is likely considerably higher.”

Just on Tuesday, officials announced that least 12 civilians were murdered by Moscow’s forces that day, including at least 5 dead after a Russian drone strike on a train in Kharkiv, and a man and woman in their 50s who were mowed down by a Russian drone as they were attempting to evacuate from hostilities in the northern Sumy region.