Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for the first time gave an official tally of Ukraine’s military losses and said 31,000 of its soldiers had been killed in the war with Russia: “Thirty-one thousand Ukrainian soldiers died in this war. Not 300,000, not 150,000, as Putin and his circle of liars say. But each of these losses is a big loss for us,” he said.
The Ukrainian leader added that he could not communicate the number of wounded, arguing that this would help the Russian army. He added that tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians were killed in the occupied territories.
On December 12, in a post on Telegram, the Ukrainian president saluted “the nearly 600,000 soldiers from various branches of the army. Brave. Heroic. Powerful.” These 31,000 soldiers killed therefore represent approximately 5% of the mobilized troops.
In August 2023, the New York Times wrote that Ukrainian forces had lost 70,000 troops killed and between 100,000 and 120,000 wounded, citing unidentified U.S. officials. On Sunday, Mr. Zelensky communicated a report well below these estimates, without them being verifiable.
Russia has provided few official casualty figures. The most recent data from the Russian Defense Ministry, published in January 2023, reported just over 6,000 deaths. Mediazona, an independent Russian media outlet, in collaboration with BBC Russia, has confirmed the names of 44,654 Russian soldiers killed since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. According to US sources at the New York Times , the Russian death toll would be some 120,000 dead and 180,000 injured.
