Ukraine is losing fewer soldiers than Russia — but it’s still losing the war

The war of attrition between Russia and Ukraine is killing soldiers at a pace unseen in Europe since World War II.

Ukrainian artillery fire, explosive drones and mines are killing Russian troops, as they repeatedly charge across the no-man’s-land. As Ukrainian positions are exposed, they are suffering heavy casualties inflicted from afar by Russian drones, shells and glide bombs.

Calculating the scale of the casualties, and therefore the war’s trajectory, is difficult: The information is a state secret in both countries. The Ukrainian government has been especially secretive, restricting access to demographic data that could be used to estimate its losses.

The most complete counts of Ukraine’s dead soldiers are made by groups abroad with biased or opaque motivations.

Working with incomplete information, these groups and other experts estimate that Ukraine has suffered about half of Russia’s irreplaceable losses — deaths and injuries that take soldiers out of battle indefinitely — in the nearly 3-year-old war.

Russia is still winning. Its much larger population and more effective recruitment have allowed it to replace losses more effectively, and to gradually push forward, said Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based military analyst.

“The fat man grows thinner. But the thin man dies,” Gady said.

Counting the Dead

The most complete publicly available tallies of Ukrainian deaths come from two opaque websites that track obituaries, posthumous medal awards, funeral announcements and other death-related information published online.

The websites — Lostarmour.info and UALosses.org — have produced similar results: They have each individually counted about 62,000 Ukrainian soldiers who have died since the invasion.

Lostarmour and UALosses say they can only find some of the dead soldiers, because obituaries are published with a delay, and some deaths are never publicized at all. Lostarmour estimates that more than 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died by December, in total.

By comparison, Russian researchers and journalists have used similar methods to estimate that Russia had suffered more than 150,000 battlefield deaths through the end of November.

Lostarmour’s casualties project is run by about 10 anonymous volunteers, most of them Russian, who scour the internet and cross check information to verify its authenticity, the website’s spokesperson said in an emailed response to questions. The group appears to sympathize with Russia and seeks to discredit Ukraine’s propaganda.

The person who claims to run UALosses told The New York Times in a message exchange on the social platform X that he is an information technology specialist based in a Western country who started his project to address a public knowledge gap. He said he has no ties to Ukraine or Russia and works anonymously to avoid legal and personal risk. The Times was not able to confirm those personal details.

The Ukrainian government has accused UALosses of “disseminating false information,” and appears to periodically block the website. Lostarmour is blocked in Ukraine, like all other websites registered in Russia.

The websites’ secrecy or ideological bias do not necessarily invalidate their findings. The independent Russian media outlet Mediazona and the Ukrainian nonprofit Memory Book have separately verified some UALosses data by taking random tally samples and matching them with online obituaries.

A Times statistical analysis of Lostarmour’s public data has found that 97% of the group’s entries are accurate with 95% certainty, with a 5% margin of error.

Intelligence Estimates

In a rare move, a prominent Ukrainian public figure in December contradicted his country’s official casualty claims.

Independent war correspondent Yurii Butusov announced to his 1.2 million YouTube subscribers that sources inside Ukrainian armed forces’ headquarters told him that 105,000 soldiers have been “irreversibly lost,” including 70,000 killed and 35,000 missing. That’s far more than the 43,000 soldiers that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed had been killed as of Dec. 8.

Butusov added that his figure excludes units outside the armed forces’ command, such as the National Guard. This would increase the total casualties number further.

A military analyst familiar with Western governments’ assessments of Ukrainian casualties said Butusov’s numbers were credible. The analyst discussed sensitive information on condition of anonymity.

Western intelligence agencies have been reluctant to disclose their internal calculations of Ukrainian casualties for fear of undermining an ally. U.S. officials have previously said that Ukraine withholds this information from even the closest allies.

Rare estimates of Ukrainian losses provided by Western officials have far exceeded Ukraine’s official figures. U.S. officials told the Times in 2023 that 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died by August of that year. Many of the bloodiest battles of the war have been fought since.

Butusov’s losses figure excludes severe injuries, a crucial aspect of a military’s fighting ability.

Missing in Action, and in Statistics

Adding to the obfuscation surrounding Ukraine’s casualties are the large number of soldiers it has declared missing in action.

About 59,000 Ukrainians were registered as missing in December, most of them soldiers, according to Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs. Butusov said in December that 35,000 armed forces members were listed as missing.

The military analyst familiar with Western assessments said the vast majority of missing Ukrainian soldiers are believed to be dead.

Ukrainian law makes it difficult for the relatives of missing men to declare them dead, for inheritance or other purposes. This has created a legal purgatory for the families whose loved ones have not been recovered from the battlefield, keeping the casualty tallies artificially low.

Combat deaths are just one aspect of a military’s depletion. A more comprehensive measure is irreplaceable, or irreversible losses: a combined number of deaths and serious injuries that prevent a soldier fighting again.

What It Means

Combining the estimates, with their caveats and shortcomings, analysts conclude that Russia loses slightly fewer than two soldiers to death and severe injury for every Ukrainian fighter who suffers the same fate.

This ratio has not allowed Ukraine to overcome Russia’s population and recruitment advantages. At current trends, Ukraine is losing a larger share of its smaller army.

There are currently more than 400,000 Russians facing about 250,000 Ukrainians on the front line, and the gap between the armies is growing, according to the military analyst familiar with Western assessments.

Russia has been able to rebuild and even expand its battered invasion force by tapping into a population that is four times larger than Ukraine’s, carrying out its first draft since World War II and enlisting felons and debtors. The government of Russia’s autocratic president, Vladimir Putin, is paying increasing bounties to new recruits, and recently began pressing people accused of crimes to enlist in exchange for dismissing charges.

These recruitment efforts brought Russia between 600 and 1,000 new fighters a day last year, according to Russian financial statistics. Ukraine matched this rate only briefly in that period.

North Korea also sent about 11,000 soldiers to aid Moscow’s forces in the Kursk region of southern Russia, where the Ukrainians captured territory last summer.

Zelenskyy’s need to contend with public opinion has led his government to delay an unpopular draft, and then left it struggling to enforce it. Some men have gone into hiding to evade conscription, or bribed draft officers to obtain an exemption. Ukraine’s tardy recruitment of convicts has produced a small fraction of fighters who had enlisted from Russian prisons.

The recruitment gap ultimately shapes the battlefield.

Russia is losing more men. But every Ukrainian casualty edges the Kremlin closer to victory.