The conflict between Russia and Ukraine is killing soldiers at a rate not seen in Europe since World War II.
Ukrainian artillery fire, explosive drones and landmines are killing Russian troops, as they repeatedly charge into no-man’s land. As Ukrainian positions are exposed, they are suffering heavy casualties from long-range Russian drones, shells and glide bombs.
Calculating the scale of casualties, and therefore the pace of the war, is difficult: the information is an official secret in both countries. Ukraine’s government has been particularly secretive, limiting access to demographic data that could be used to estimate its losses.
The full count of dead Ukrainian soldiers is carried out abroad by groups with partisan or ambiguous motivations.
Working with incomplete information, experts estimate that Ukraine has suffered nearly half of Russia’s irreparable losses — deaths and injuries that take soldiers out of combat indefinitely — in the nearly three-year-old war. .
Russia is still winning. Vienna-based military analyst Franz Stefan Geddy said its larger population and more efficient recruiting allowed it to more effectively replace losses and advance more slowly.
“A fat man grows thin. But a thin man dies,” said Mr. Gaddy.
Count the dead
The most complete publicly available numbers of Ukrainian deaths come from two obscure websites that track posthumous medal awards, funeral announcements and other obituary information published online.
Websites – Lostarmour.info And UALlosses.org — have produced similar results: each of them individually counted about 62,000 Ukrainian soldiers who have died since the invasion.
Lostarmour and the UALosses say they can only find some dead soldiers, because death reports are published with delays, and some deaths are never made public. Lustarmor estimates that a total of 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died by December.
In comparison, Russian researchers and journalists have used similar methods to estimate that Russia suffered more than 150,000 battlefield deaths by the end of November.
A spokesman for the website said in an emailed response to questions that the Lostarmour killings project is run by about 10 anonymous volunteers, most of them Russian, who scour the Internet to verify its authenticity. Cross information. The group sympathizes with Russia and attempts to discredit Ukrainian propaganda.
The man claiming to run UALosses told The New York Times in a message exchange on X that he is an IT expert based in a Western country who started his project to address public knowledge gaps. He said he has no ties to Ukraine or Russia and works anonymously to avoid legal and personal risk. The Times was not able to confirm these personal details.
The Ukrainian government has accused UALosses of “spreading disinformation” and appears to block the website from time to time. Like all other websites registered in Russia, Lustarmore is blocked in Ukraine.
The privacy or ideological bias of websites does not necessarily invalidate their findings. Independent Russian media outlet Mediazona and Ukrainian nonprofit A book of memory Some UALlosses data have been verified separately by taking a random number of samples and matching them with online beads.
A Times statistical analysis of Lostarmour’s public data found that 97 percent of the group’s entries are accurate with 95 percent certainty, with a 5 percent margin of error.
Intelligence estimates
In an unusual move, a prominent Ukrainian public figure in December denied his country’s official claims of casualties.
War of Independence Correspondent Yuri Butusov announced to his 1.2 million YouTube subscribers. Sources inside the headquarters of Ukraine’s armed forces told him that 105,000 soldiers had been “irretrievably lost”, including 70,000 killed and 35,000 missing. That’s far more than the 43,000 soldiers that President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed had been killed by December 8.
Mr Batusov added that his figures did not include units outside the command of the armed forces, such as the National Guard. This will further increase the overall death toll.
A military analyst familiar with Western government assessments of Ukrainian casualties said Mr Butusov’s numbers were credible. The analyst discussed sensitive information on condition of anonymity.
Western intelligence agencies are reluctant to reveal their internal accounts of Ukrainian casualties for fear of undermining their allies. US officials have previously said that Kiev withholds this information even from its closest allies.
Rare estimates of Ukrainian casualties provided by Western officials are much higher than official figures from Kiev. U.S. officials told The Times in 2023 that 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died as of August of that year. Since then, many bloody battles of the war have been fought.
Mr. Batusov’s casualty figures do not include serious injuries, a critical aspect of an army’s ability to fight.
In practice, and missing in data
Adding to the confusion over Ukraine’s casualties is the large number of soldiers it has declared missing in action.
According to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, some 59,000 Ukrainians went missing in December, most of them soldiers. Mr Botusov said in December that 35,000 members of the armed forces were missing.
A military analyst familiar with Western assessments said the majority of the missing Ukrainian soldiers were believed to have died.
Ukrainian law makes it difficult for relatives of missing persons to declare them dead for inheritance or other purposes. This has created a legal limbo for families whose loved ones have not recovered from the battlefield, and the death toll is kept artificially low.
Ukrainian cafe worker Ilyona Bondar said she had not heard from her brother, a soldier, since he went missing on the battlefield in southern Ukraine in 2023.
“It would be better to tell the truth, including for my brother’s sake,” she said in a phone interview. “It would be better to visit the grave, than to lie in a field for a year and a half.”
Combat deaths are only one aspect of the army’s shortages. A more comprehensive measure is irreparable, or irreversible damage: a combined number of deaths and serious injuries that prevent a soldier from fighting again.
What does it mean?
Combining the estimates, with their caveats and omissions, analysts conclude that Russia loses a little less than two soldiers killed and seriously wounded for every Ukrainian fighter who suffers the same fate.
This ratio has not allowed Ukraine to overcome Russia’s population and recruitment advantages. In current trends, Ukraine is losing a large part of its small army.
More than 400,000 Russians are currently facing about 250,000 Ukrainians on the front line, and the gulf between the forces is widening, according to a military analyst familiar with Western assessments.
Russia has been able to rebuild and even expand its battered invasion force by tapping into a population four times the size of Ukraine, carrying out its first draft since World War II, and deporting criminals and debtors. Included in the list. The government of Russia’s autocratic President Vladimir V. Putin has been offering increasing rewards to new recruits, and has recently begun pressuring people accused of crimes to enlist in exchange for pleading guilty.
According to Russian financial statistics, these recruitment efforts brought Russia 600 to 1,000 new fighters a day last year. Kyiv only briefly matched that rate in that period.
North Korea also sent about 11,000 troops to support Moscow’s forces in southern Russia’s Kursk region, which was seized by Ukrainians last summer.
Mr. Zielinski’s need to compete with public opinion forced his government to delay an unpopular draft, and then stop struggling to implement it. Some men have gone into hiding to avoid conscription, or have bribed draft officers to obtain exemptions. The delayed recruitment of criminals in Ukraine has produced a small fraction of fighters who were recruited from Russian prisons.
The recruiting gap ultimately shapes the battlefield.
Russia is losing more men. But every Ukrainian loss brings the Kremlin closer to victory.
Daria Matiuk, Yuri Shevala. And Oleksandra Mikulishian Contributed reporting from Kyiv and Oleg Matsnev From Berlin
