Quarter-Million Russian Dead in Ukraine War so Far, Says London

The invasion of Ukraine is the deadliest conflict for Russia since the Second World War, the British government says, as it places the “likely” death toll for Russian Federation forces at a quarter of a million so far.

Russia is “likely” to have taken 900,000 casualties in all since it renewed its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and between 200,000 and 250,000 of those are fatalities, an intelligence digest from Britain’s Ministry of Defence has said.

The review of Russia’s combat casualties so far come as U.S. President Donald Trump places clear emphasises on ending what he calls the “killing fields” of the Ukraine War, taking what he cited as “two thousands” lives a week. Analysing the Kremlin’s position, the UK digest noted Putin and the Russian military leadership appears to have a deep appetite for death of their own troops “as this does not negatively affect public or elite support for the war”.

This, they say, is being achieved in part by focussing army recruitment on the poorer, ethnically non-European parts of Russia’s vast multiracial empire, shielding “Slavic Russians from urban centres such as Moscow and St. Petersburg” from the killing. In all, the war is “Russia’s largest losses since the Second World War.”

The United Kingdom has never revealed what data it bases its periodic reviews of Russian military casualties on, but in this case it appears to track strongly in some respects with the official Kyiv numbers, which claim 899,470 Russian casualties as of this morning. Ukraine also lists what it says are the precise tallies of Russian vehicles and weapon systems destroyed, claiming 10,377 tanks and 21,561 Armoured Personnel Carriers to have fallen to its actions.

Ukraine had previously claimed to kill 150,000 Russians in 2024 alone.

Ukraine is not — as is pretty normal in wartime — so forthcoming about its own combat casualties, but there are competing claims. President Trump said in January that it was his understanding that “almost a million Russian soldiers have been killed. About 700,000 Ukrainian soldiers are killed”.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky strongly rejected the notion that his country had nearly experienced as many dead as Russia, saying Moscow forces had died at a rate of seven-to-one compared to Kyiv, with 350,000 Russian dead compared to 45,000 Ukrainian dead.