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The war of attrition between Russia and Ukraine is killing soldiers at a rate not seen in Europe since World War II.
Ukrainian gunfire, exploding drones and landmines are killing Russian soldiers as they repeatedly cross no-man’s land. Because the Ukrainians’ positions are exposed, they suffer heavy casualties from Russian drones, shells and glide bombs.
It is difficult to count the number of dead, and therefore the course of the war: the information is a state secret in both countries. The Ukrainian government has been particularly secretive, limiting access to demographic data that can be used to estimate losses.
The most comprehensive count of the dead soldiers in Ukraine is carried out by outside groups with ulterior motives.
Working with incomplete information, experts estimate that Ukraine suffered half of Russia’s irreparable losses—deaths and injuries that sideline troops indefinitely—in in the war for almost three years.
Russia still wins. Its larger population and more efficient recruitment have allowed it to replace losses more efficiently, and advance more slowly, said Franz-Stefan Gady, a military analyst based in Vienna.
“The fat man is getting thinner. But the thin one died,” said Mr. Gady.
Count the dead
The most comprehensive Ukrainian death toll available publicly comes from two obscure websites that track deaths, posthumous medal awards, funeral announcements and other information. related to death posted online.
The websites — Lostarmour.info and UALosses.org — produced similar results: Both counted about 62,000 Ukrainian soldiers dead since the invasion.
Lostarmour and UALosses say that they only saw some of the dead soldiers, because the obituaries were published with a delay, and the deaths of others were not published at all. Lostarmour estimates that more than 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers died in December.
By comparison, Russian researchers and journalists used similar methods to estimate that Russia had suffered more than 150,000 war deaths by the end of November.
Lostarmour’s project is run by about 10 anonymous volunteers, most of whom are Russian, who scour the Internet and check information to verify its authenticity, a website spokeswoman said. in the response sent to the question. The group appears to be sympathetic to Russia and seeks to discredit Ukraine’s campaign.
The person who claims to run UALosses told The New York Times in an exchange of messages with X that he is an IT specialist living in a Western country who started his project to address the knowledge gap for the public. He says he has no ties to Ukraine or Russia and is working anonymously to avoid legal and personal harm. The Times could not verify these specific details.
The Ukrainian government has accused UALosses of “spreading false information,” and appears to block the site from time to time. Lostarmour is blocked in Ukraine, like all other websites registered in Russia.
The site’s privacy or ideological bias does not necessarily invalidate its findings. Independent Russian media Mediazona and Ukrainian non-profit Memory Book separately verified some UALosses data by taking random tally samples and matching them with online obituaries.
A Times statistical analysis of Lostarmour’s public records found that 97 percent of the group’s entries were correct with a 95 percent certainty, with 5 percent -percent of error.
Intelligence estimates
In a rare move, a prominent Ukrainian figure in December defied official claims of his country’s demise.
Yurii Butusov, a freelance war journalist, told his 1.2 million YouTube subscribers that sources from the headquarters of the Ukrainian Armed Forces told him that 105,000 soldiers were “inevitably lost”. , including 70,000 dead and 35,000 missing. That’s far more than the 43,000 soldiers President Volodymyr Zelensky said died on December 8.
Mr. Butusov added that his picture does not include units outside the command of the Army, such as the National Guard. This will increase the death toll.
A military analyst familiar with Western government estimates of Ukrainian casualties said Mr. Butusov. Reviewers spoke about sensitive information on condition of anonymity.
Western intelligence agencies are reluctant to release internal calculations of Ukrainian casualties for fear of undermining their allies. Former US officials have said Kyiv is withholding that information from even its closest allies.
A rare estimate of Ukrainian losses given by Western officials far exceeded Kyiv’s official figures. US officials told The Times in 2023 that 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died in August of that year. Many of the bloodiest battles of the war have been fought since then.
Mr. Butusov’s casualty count does not include serious injuries, an important aspect of a soldier’s ability to fight.
Not found in work, and in statistics
Adding to the confusion surrounding the casualties in Ukraine are the number of soldiers he says are missing.
About 59,000 Ukrainians were registered as missing in December, most of them soldiers, according to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry. Mr. Butusov said in December that 35,000 members of the Armed Forces were listed as missing.
The military analyst familiar with Western assessments said most of the missing Ukrainian soldiers were believed to be dead.
Ukrainian law makes it difficult for relatives of missing men to declare them dead, for inheritance or other purposes. This created a legal purgatory for families whose loved ones had not yet recovered from the war, keeping the death toll low.
Ukrainian cafe worker Alyona Bondar says she hasn’t heard from her brother, a soldier, since he disappeared from a battlefield in southern Ukraine in 2023.
“It’s better to tell the truth, including about my brother,” he said in a phone interview. “It is better to have a grave to visit, than to lie in the field for a year and a half.”
Death in war is one aspect of military destruction. A more comprehensive measure is irreplaceable, or irreparable loss: the total number of dead and seriously wounded that prevents a soldier from fighting again.
What does it mean
Combining the estimates, with caveats and errors, analysts conclude that Russia suffered less than two soldiers killed and seriously wounded for every Ukrainian fighter that was involved.
This ratio did not allow Ukraine to overcome Russia’s population and recruitment advantage. In current trends, Ukraine is losing a large part of its smaller army.
There are now more than 400,000 Russians facing about 250,000 Ukrainians on the front lines, and the gap between the forces is widening, according to military analysts familiar with Western assessments.
Russia was able to rebuild and even expand its invasion force by tapping a population four times the size of Ukraine, implementing the draft for the first time since World War II and introducing criminals and debtors. The government of Russia’s autocratic president, Vladimir V. Putin, pays large sums of money for new recruits, and recently began forcing people accused of crimes to register in exchange for dropping charges.
Those recruitment efforts brought Russia between 600 and 1,000 new fighters a day last year, according to Russian financial statistics. Kyiv was small at that time.
North Korea has also sent about 11,000 troops to help Moscow’s forces in the Kursk region of southern Russia, which the Ukrainians seized last summer.
Mr Zelensky’s need to fight public opinion led his government to delay the unpopular bill, and then left him struggling to implement it. Some men went into hiding to avoid exploitation, or bribed government officials to gain release. Ukraine’s late intake of convicts has produced a small fraction of registered fighters in Russian prisons.
The hiring gap ultimately shapes the battlefield.
Russia is becoming more male. But every Ukrainian casualty brings the Kremlin closer to victory.
Daria Mitiuk, Yurii Shyvala SY Oleksandra Mykolyshyn contributed to the report from Kiev and Oleg Matsnev from Berlin.
