KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A new report warns that the number of soldiers killed, wounded or missing on both sides of Russia’s war against Ukraine could reach 2 million by spring, with Russia suffering the highest number of troop deaths on record for any major power in any conflict since World War II.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies report came less than a month before the fourth anniversary of Moscow’s February 24 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The CSIS report, released Tuesday, said Russia suffered 1.2 million casualties, including up to 325,000 soldier deaths, between February 2022 and December 2025.
“Despite claims about the dynamics of the battlefield in Ukraine, the data show that Russia is paying an extraordinary price for minimal gains and is in decline as a major power,” the report said. “No major power has suffered anywhere near this number of casualties or deaths in any war since World War II.”
Ukraine, with its smaller army and population, is estimated to have suffered between 500,000 and 600,000 military casualties, including up to 140,000 dead.
Neither Moscow nor Kiev provide timely data on military casualties, and each side tries to amplify the other’s losses.
Commenting on the report, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that the research could not be considered “reliable information” and that only Russia’s Defense Ministry was authorized to provide information on military casualties.
The ministry’s last statement on battlefield deaths was in September 2022, when it said just under 6,000 Russian soldiers had been killed. Since then, it has not published updated figures.
There was no immediate comment from the Ukrainian government.
In an interview with NBC in February 2025, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that more than 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since the beginning of the war.
The report estimated that at current rates, the combined losses from Russia and Ukraine could be as high as 1.8 million and could reach 2 million by spring.
The CSIS figures were compiled using the Washington, DC think tank’s own analysis, data published by independent Russian news site Mediazona with the BBC, British government estimates and interviews with state officials.
A war of attrition
Information about military casualties has been suppressed in Russian media, activists and independent journalists say.
Mediazona, together with the BBC and a team of volunteers, has so far collected the names of more than 160,000 soldiers killed from news, social media and government websites.
The report also says that Russian forces have advanced at a slow pace since taking the initiative on the battlefield in 2024, despite their much larger size.
Russia’s advance into Ukraine has largely turned into a war of attrition, and analysts say Russian President Vladimir Putin is in no rush to find a solution, despite his military’s difficulties along the roughly 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front line.
The report said Russian forces advanced at an average rate of 15 to 70 meters (49 to 230 feet) per day in their most important offensives.
This is “slower than almost any major offensive campaign in any war in the last century,” the report said.
Putin said at his annual press conference last month that 700,000 Russian soldiers are fighting in Ukraine. It gave the same number in 2024 and a slightly lower figure — 617,000 — in December 2023. It was not possible to verify these figures.
2 killed in an attack in the Kyiv region
Officials said on Wednesday that two people were killed near the Ukrainian capital and at least nine others were wounded in the attacks across Ukraine.
A man and a woman were killed in an overnight attack in the Bilohorodka area on the outskirts of Kiev, according to Mykola Kalashnyk, head of the regional military administration.
Officials in the Ukrainian cities of Odesa and Kryvyi Rih, as well as the Zaporizhzhia region, also reported Russian attacks overnight that injured at least nine people and damaged infrastructure.
The Ukrainian air force said Russia attacked overnight with a ballistic missile and 146 attack drones, 103 of which were shot down or destroyed by electronic warfare.
Meanwhile, Russia’s Defense Ministry said its air defenses had destroyed 75 Ukrainian drones overnight. Twenty-four were shot down over Russia’s southwestern Krasnodar region, and another 23 were shot down over the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia illegally annexed in 2016.
Two drones were shot down over Russia’s Voronezh region, where Ukraine’s General Staff said on Wednesday it hit the Khokholskaya oil depot. Regional governor Alexander Gusev wrote on Telegram that the debris of the falling drone started a fire involving oil products, but did not provide further details.