CNN
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Nearly 1 million Russian soldiers have been killed or injured in the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to a new study, a grisly measure of the human cost of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked three-year assault on his neighbor.
Russia will likely hit the 1 million casualty mark this summer, said the study, published Tuesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank in Washington, DC. It said the “stunning” milestone was a “sign of Putin’s blatant disregard for his soldiers.”
Of the estimated 950,000 Russian casualties so far, as many as 250,000 are dead, according to the study. “No Soviet or Russian war since World War II has even come close to Ukraine in terms of fatality rate,” it said. Ukraine has sustained nearly 400,000 casualties, it added, with between 60,000 and 100,000 deaths.
Although Kyiv does not disclose its own combat losses in any detail and Moscow is believed to drastically underestimate its own casualties, the CSIS figures are in line with British and United States intelligence assessments.
In March, the British defense ministry estimated that Russia had sustained around 900,000 casualties since 2022. For months, it has judged that Russia is losing about 1,000 soldiers each day, whether killed or wounded. Based on that trend, Russia would be expected to surpass the 1 million threshold in the coming weeks.
Rebutting claims from some Western lawmakers that Russia holds “all the cards” in the war in Ukraine, the CSIS study used Russian casualty figures – as well as estimates of its heavy equipment losses and sluggish territorial gains – as evidence that Moscow’s military “has performed relatively poorly on the battlefield” and failed to achieve its main war goals.
After Ukraine repelled Russia’s initial “blitzkrieg” assault in 2022, the war has since become attritional. While Kyiv dug in with trenches and mines, Moscow funneled more and more troops into what have become known as “meat grinder” assaults, throwing soldiers into campaigns for only marginal territorial gains, the study said.
In the northeastern Kharkiv region, Russian forces have advanced an average of only 50 meters per day, according to the study. That is slower than the British and French advance in the Battle of the Somme in the trench warfare of World War I.
The slow rate of advance has meant Russia has seized only 1% of Ukrainian territory since January 2024, which the authors called a “paltry” amount. Russia now occupies around 20% of Ukraine’s territory, including the Crimean peninsula that Moscow annexed in 2014.
But Russia’s dwindling territorial gains have not led to a change in strategy. To sustain Russia’s staggering rate of casualties, the Kremlin has enlisted convicts from its prisons and welcomed more than 10,000 troops from its ally North Korea, but it has left the children of Moscow and St. Petersburg elites largely untouched.
Instead, Moscow has recruited in the far north and far east of the country, where men have been lured by pay packages that are life-changing among poorer communities in those regions. “Putin likely considers these types of soldiers more expendable and less likely to undermine his domestic support base,” the study noted.
Whereas Ukraine, a democracy with a population less than a quarter the size of Russia’s, has faced some pushback in its attempts to mobilize more troops, Russia, where criticism of the war has been outlawed, has faced no significant dissent. But, with the war now well into its fourth year, the authors warned that the “blood cost” of its protracted campaign was a potential vulnerability for Putin.
Although Russia has had the “initiative” in the conflict since early 2024, the authors said the attritional nature of the war has left “few opportunities for decisive breakthroughs.”
Instead, Russia’s main hope to win “is for the United States to cut off aid to Ukraine” – as President Donald Trump briefly did earlier this year – and “walk away from the conflict” – as officials in his administration have threatened to do.
