Russia and Ukraine have devoted much of their public relations efforts to inflating the casualties of their opponents and playing down their own, making an objective count difficult in one of the bloodiest wars of the 21st century.
The inflation of enemy casualty statistics and the downplaying of friendly casualty statistics have been hallmarks of war propaganda since its modern birth with the printing press. This PR war has reached new heights with the Russia-Ukraine War.
Kyiv seeks to boost international support by portraying its outnumbered forces as punching well above their weight by mowing down disproportionate hordes of enemy troops. Moscow seeks to downplay domestic fears by portraying its own forces as suffering relatively little as its firepower superiority takes out legions of enemy troops from afar.
Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky brought attention back to this psychological struggle with his offering of a remarkably low death count for Ukrainian soldiers.
“Officially, on the battlefield, the number of soldiers killed, whether career soldiers or mobilized ones, is 55,000,” Zelensky told France 2 in an interview. “And there are a large number of people that Ukraine considers missing.”
This total is highly improbable and was largely dismissed by analysts. The true total is currently impossible to estimate, but some factors and information give hints.
Historical precedent
The Russia-Ukraine War features an unprecedented situation in modern history: two large, developed, near-peer rivals of roughly equal technological capabilities engaging each other in all-out battles using most of their combat potential.
Most conventional wars of recent history have been between technologically or quantitatively mismatched foes, with casualties likewise heavily unbalanced towards the superior side. Wars such as the American-led invasion of Iraq, the Russo-Georgian War, and the coalition war against ISIS saw the numerical and technological superiority of the larger belligerent result in far more casualties for the inferior side.
The closest equivalent to the Russia-Ukraine War is the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War between Armenia and Azerbaijan. While most of their military hardware was comparable, Azerbaijan possessed air supremacy through its clear superiority in drone technology, a preview of the unparalleled role drones would play in Ukraine two years later. Accounts are split as to the final death count, but the defending Armenia seems to have suffered fewer deaths than Azerbaijan. The smaller size of the two and the relatively short duration of the war, 44 days, capped the total number of deaths at around 10,000.
Do combat dynamics suggest higher Russian or Ukrainian casualties?
Most Western sources, with better access to Ukrainian intelligence and reports, suggest much higher Russian casualties. Several notable dynamics suggest caution in this assumption, however.
Despite the development and advances in tanks, machine guns, drones, and attack aircraft over the past century, artillery has remained the main killer in nearly every single major conflict, usually inflicting a clear majority of casualties. The stress on shell supplies in Ukrainian appeals for Western support, scenes of barren frontline landscapes, and the ubiquity of artillery in the war suggest this dynamic has likely remained largely the same, despite the recent surge of drones.
Together, Russia and Ukraine are estimated to have fired tens of millions of artillery shells throughout the nearly four-year-long war. Russia has fired several more times shells than Ukraine — a frequently cited CNN report from March 2024 reported that Russia fired around 10,000 shells a day compared to just 2,000 a day from Ukraine.
Russia’s investment in its defense industry since the war’s beginning and North Korea’s help have allowed it to outpace Ukraine and all of its allies combined in terms of shell production.
Russia is also widely acknowledged to have outpaced Ukraine in the drone arms race, producing many more FPV drones. It was also able to seize the technological edge in drone production last year.
The one major dynamic in Ukraine’s favor is its defensive position. After three years of counterattacks with mixed results, 2025 marked the first year Kyiv didn’t mount any major counteroffensives. Its focus on defense puts Russia at a disadvantage, especially with modern drone capabilities preventing the massing of offensive forces for a decisive push at a single point.
Russian and Ukrainian death estimates
Open source intelligence projects have provided a floor of confirmed Russian and Ukrainian deaths, both well above the official counts.
The floor of Russian casualties comes from Mediazona and BBC Russia, which have a guaranteed number of Russian dead through analyses of social media posts, obituaries, and posts from regional authorities.
As of the most recent update, Mediazona recorded 168,142 Russian dead since Feb. 24, 2022, including 6,353 officers. It also provided an extrapolation of the data for a probable estimate of the true number of dead, given the certainty of unreported deaths — roughly 219,000.
HOW DRONE WARFARE DEVELOPED IN UKRAINE IN 2025
Ukraine’s floor comes from UAlosses.org, a Ukrainian open source intelligence project which tracks Ukrainian deaths through similar means, using announcements by local authorities and media, social media posts, and monuments to the dead. It acknowledges the true total is much higher, as available data is scarce for “large cities, Transcarpathia, and most localities in the east and south,” making the count “likely only a fraction of the real toll.
The confirmed number of Ukrainian military deaths since Feb. 24, 2022, is given as 92,330. However, it separately includes the number of missing, with many, if not most of these likely dead — 89,234. Adding the 4,461 prisoners, the combined total is 186,025. An extrapolation like Mediazona wasn’t given, but is likely close to the estimate of Russian deaths.
