Russia Lost 400,000 Soldiers In A Year And A Half To Seize 1% Of Ukraine's Territory
- 14.05.2025, 20:47
The RF is suffering its largest losses since World War II.
The ongoing offensive in Ukraine is coming at an increasingly high cost to the Russian army, which has already suffered the largest casualties in the war since World War II.
Since early 2024, when the Ukrainian counteroffensive failed and Russian forces seized the initiative on the battlefield, Russian generals have managed to take control of only 4,731 square kilometers, or less than 1 percent of Ukraine's territory, notes The New York Times citing data from the US Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
Russian troop losses over the same time period - the 16 months from January-2024 to April-2025 - exceeded 400,000 people killed wounded, according to US government estimates, the NYT writes. Thus, for each square kilometer of newly captured territory, the army paid with "losses" of 84 people.
The total losses of the Russian army since the beginning of the invasion by January 2025 reached 783 thousand people, which is close to the population of Tyumen or Saratov. The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) estimates that the army has lost 172 thousand people killed, which is close to the population of Norilsk or Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.
In total, according to IISS estimates, Russia has enlisted almost 1 million people in combat operations: taking into account contract soldiers forcibly mobilized in occupied Donbass, sent to the troops during mobilization in the fall of 2022 and recruited in prisons, 976 thousand people have been sent to the front. Of these, one in three, according to IISS estimates, were severely wounded at the front and became disabled. That's a total of 376,000 people - the population of Bryansk or Tver.
As of May 2025, the Russian army controls about 20 percent of Ukraine's territory, but almost all of these gains were made in the first weeks of the war. The Russian army has almost the entire Luhansk region under its control, as well as about 70% of the territory of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhya and Kherson regions, Reuters calculated based on ISW data.