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 its 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 two 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?