Washington: Russia's war against Ukraine has extracted a huge price, with almost a million Russian troops dead or injured since the invasion started in February 2022, a report by the US-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has said. The Ukrainian toll, though lower, is also heavy, with almost 400,000 dead or injured, taking the number of casualties to almost 1.4 million in a little over three years.
The statistics come from a mix of US and British intelligence estimates and other open-source sources. While accurate numbers are lacking—Moscow is reported to fudge its losses and Kyiv does not release military casualty figures—the CSIS report is one of the most thorough independent attempts to quantify the war's human toll to date, the New York Times reported.
Despite the scale of its losses, Russia has seized less than 1 percent of additional Ukrainian territory since January 2024 and now controls about 20 percent of Ukraine in total. The CSIS study notes that Russian forces are advancing in some areas at a rate of only 165 feet per day, slower than some of the most infamous battles of World War I.
The rough estimate of 250,000 Russian military fatalities makes this Russia's deadliest conflict since World War II. In comparison, Ukrainian fatalities are estimated at 60,000 to 100,000. Still, with Russia deploying a force of over 400,000 troops—almost three times as many as Ukraine's 250,000—Kyiv is losing proportionally more from its national population and military.
Russia to hand over 6000 dead bodies of soldiers to Ukraine
The second round of direct peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul ended without any breakthrough this week, but the two warring sides agreed to a deal to swap more prisoners of war. Under the deal, Moscow agreed to hand over about 6,000 frozen bodies of fallen Ukrainian soldiers to Kyiv by next week, said Kremlin aide Vladimir Medinsky.
The development comes after Ukraine executed Operation Spiderweb, a drone attack on Russia, after 18 months of planning. Ukrainian President Zelensky oversaw the operation, which involved smuggling drones into Russia and hiding them in mobile wooden cabins.
