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With high casualty figures and the slow pace of Russia’s territorial gains, President Vladimir V. Putin could face years more of a grinding war of attrition in Ukraine.
June 3, 2025, 4:10 p.m. ET
Nearly one million Russian troops have been killed or wounded in the country’s war against Ukraine, according to a new study, a staggering toll as Russia’s three-year assault on its neighbor grinds on.
The study, published on Tuesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that close to 400,000 Ukrainian troops have also been killed or wounded since the war began. That would put the overall casualty figure, for Russian and Ukrainian troops combined, at almost 1.4 million.
Officials cautioned that casualty figures were difficult to estimate because Moscow is believed to routinely undercount its war dead and injured, and Kyiv does not disclose official figures. The study published on Tuesday relied on casualty figures from American and British government estimates, among other sources.
The figures present an overall accounting of Russia’s slow progress in Ukraine, with Russia proceeding in some places at around 165 feet a day, slower than even the bogged-down and costly Somme advance of British and French troops in World War I. Since January 2024, Russia has seized less than 1 percent of Ukrainian territory, according to CSIS, even as it continues to advance in the country. Overall, Russia occupies about 20 percent of Ukraine.
“Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine is on pace to be among the slowest offensive campaigns in modern warfare,” said Seth G. Jones, one of the authors of the study. “They have suffered upwards of one million casualties; they have taken a tiny amount of territory; and they have lost massive amounts of equipment.”
The center put the number of Russian troop deaths at close to 250,000 since President Vladimir V. Putin ordered the invasion in February 2022. “No Soviet or Russian war since World War II has even come close to Ukraine in terms of fatality rate,” the study said.
