Russia’s military losses in Ukraine surpass any major power since WWII. Yet re-deployed wounded obscure the true toll.

Despite the Kremlin’s triumphant rhetoric, Russia’s creeping battlefield gains in Ukraine have come at a staggering cost. A new report from the U.S.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimates that by the end of 2025, Russia had suffered nearly 1.2 million military casualties, exceeding the losses of any major power in any conflict since World War II. The study also estimates that total combat casualties on both the Russian and Ukrainian sides are now approaching two million. Meduza breaks down what these shocking numbers really mean.

Who the numbers represent

CSIS projects that Russia’s combat losses will reach 1.2 million by the end of 2025. That number includes killed, missing, and wounded soldiers, but not civilian casualties. Out of this total, only about a quarter are dead: between 275,000 and 325,000.

This roughly matches the estimates Meduza and Mediazona have calculated using inheritance case data and lists of soldiers whose deaths have been individually confirmed by name. According to the latest calculations, by mid-2025, around 220,000 Russian soldiers had died in the war. By the end of the year, preliminary figures put deaths at about 300,000.

Wounded soldiers, who are included in the 1.2 million total estimated by CSIS, often return to service. However, Meduza and Mediazona have never released combined loss figures for the dead and the wounded. (Injured soldiers don’t appear in obituaries or inheritance registries, so there is far less publicly available information about them.) Combining irreplaceable and temporary losses in this way can be misleading.

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Counting missing soldiers is also tricky. Russian data on missing troops is very sparse. Many of those initially listed as missing by unit commanders eventually turn out to have been killed.

For instance, when Meduza and Mediazona analyzed leaked records on missing soldiers from Russia’s 1st Guards Tank Army, about half of them were later confirmed dead. However, given battlefield changes since the spring of 2022, it’s unclear how representative that example is for missing soldiers overall in this war.

Since mid-2024, Russian military units have been filing lawsuits en masse to have missing soldiers officially declared dead. By December 2025, there were around 90,000 such cases — we don’t know how many more dead soldiers are officially considered missing by their units.

Meanwhile, information on missing Ukrainian soldiers is freely available through UALosses, a database maintained by anonymous volunteers. The project currently lists around 85,000 named casualties.

Where the data comes from

In the end, the only figures in the CSIS report that can be backed up with documentation are Russian deaths (including an unknown number of missing) and some of the dead and missing soldiers on the Ukrainian side. Estimates of the wounded on both sides appear to be either based on intelligence sources or are purely speculative.

The authors of the report don’t explain exactly how they arrived at their estimates for either side. They only write that their number are based on “CSIS estimates; UK Ministry of Defence estimates; analysis of data collected by Russian news outlet Mediazona and the BBC Russian Service; and author estimates based on interviews with U.S., European, and Ukrainian government officials.”

It’s unclear how they got the figures for the wounded, who don’t appear on any lists that are confirmed by name. Nor do they reference publicly available named lists of Ukrainian soldiers killed in action, such as those maintained by the UALosses project.

Where the math doesn’t add up

The report’s authors write:

Russian battlefield casualties and fatalities are significantly greater than Ukrainian casualties and fatalities — with a ratio of roughly 2.5:1 or 2:1. Ukrainian forces likely suffered somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 casualties, including killed, wounded, and missing, and between 100,000 and 140,000 fatalities between February 2022 and December 2025.

Once again, the sources cited are CSIS’s own calculations and the named lists compiled by Mediazona and BBC News Russian — though neither actually tracks Ukrainian losses.

The UALosses named lists currently include 177,000 people: 87,000 killed, 85,900 missing, and 4,500 captured. Therefore, the 100,000–140,000 deaths estimate is only plausible if about half of Ukraine’s missing are still alive, and all of the dead have been identified.

In theory, that’s possible. But there are two reasons to doubt it:

• First, we know that in Russia, only around 50–60 percent of the dead make it into named lists, depending on age and date of death. The CSIS report offers no evidence to suggest that Ukrainian lists are somehow far more complete.
• Second, officer casualties on both sides are almost identical: 6,534 for Ukraine, 6,168 for Russia. That’s hard to reconcile with a 2–2.5 to 1 ratio overall, as the report claims. Russia has far more enlisted personnel, which could skew the ratio of officers killed — but the authors don’t address this in their report, nor do they explain their methodology for counting Ukrainian losses.

What ‘more losses than any major power since World War II’ means

The sheer scale of Russia’s losses stands out especially when compared with U.S. casualties in the wars it has fought since 1945. Even if you combine those killed, missing, and wounded in the Vietnam War, total U.S. losses come to about 47,000. In the Korean War, the figure is 54,000. Both are considerably smaller than Russia’s losses in this war — even if we count only the dead, at roughly 300,000.

That said, the statement shouldn’t be taken to mean that there haven’t been other wars with comparable losses since 1945. CSIS is specifically comparing so-called “major powers.” In both Korea and Vietnam, the U.S.’s opponents suffered far heavier losses — 317,000 and 700,000, respectively, according to the American Correlates of War project.

Meduza’s Explainers team