Russia - Ukraine War

Casualties and Strategies

February 1st, 2026

There is a recent report by a major think tank that looks at casualties in the Russo-Ukraine war. In doing so I believe they have made errors in their analysis, but more importantly, have mis-characterized the war.

The numbers provided in the study are as follows:

Russian casualties (Killed / wounded or missing / total):

325,000 / 900,000 / 1,200,000

Ukrainian casualties:

100,000 - 140,000 / 500,000 - 600,000 / 600,000 - 740,000

They make it clear that these numbers come from a variety of sources, the same sources everyone who follows the war regularly scan. The end result is a function of how heavily you weigh one source as opposed to another, and I will touch on that again below.

But, to understand these numbers and place them in some sort of context, a few things need to be said up front: in every war in which there was some effort to establish accurate casualty counts, certain relationships emerge, KIAs to WIAs, quality of medical care immediately following a wound and its impact on survival rates, how casualties are caused, etc.

In order to provide a bit more context, her are some relevant numbers from US combat since 2001 - which is an entirely different sort of war, but will be useful in highlighting some issues with the data.

US Casualties OEF plus OIF (5 to 1 wounded to killed ratio)

5429 combat deaths 1,388 other deaths 6,817 total dead

Wounded Amputees

32,315 1,316 (4.1% of wounded)

Wounded who returned to active Duty: 84%

For Reference: the Returned to Active Duty rate was 75% in Vietnam

Amputees 1316 4.1% of wounded 

24% of KIA

A key issue with US killed and wounded ratios in the last several decades is the availability of MEDEVAC, in particular helicopters rapidly moving wounded to a hospital. This is a function of the conditions on and over the battlefield. The US established absolute air control over Iraq and Afghanistan and movement of these helicopters allowed rapid evacuation. 

Ukraine’s battlefields suffer from pervasive air denial and drones also limit ground movement. Evacuation of wounded often takes not minutes but hours and sometimes days.

Returning to the study, it has two “simple” faults: one, it overstates Russian losses and two it understates Ukrainian losses. But, the more important issue is that it mis-characterizes the war.

Concerning Russian casualties, the one public source that makes any effort to apply rigorous standards to the data is Mediazone, a Russian opposition group that is using sources inside Russia to construct a count. They hold the current KIA count is 165,000 named dead, an estimate of 219,000 based on probate registry, and also state up front that they are missing some. After going over and over the data, my take is that 165,000 should be taken as a hard, bottom number, 219,000 is a good middle figure, and that the maximum error is 20%. That would place the Russian KIA count as 165,000 - 263,000, as of last week.

When we look at total casualties, that would work out to (again KIA / Severely wounded / Wounded returning to active duty / POWs / deserters) and Non-recoverable losses (killed + severely wounded + POWs + deserters)

Low

165,000 / 145,000 / 350,000 / 10,000 / 50,000  (370,000)

Middle

219,000 / 195,000 / 460,000 / 10,000 / 50,000  (474,000)

High

263,000 / 235,000 / 552,000 / 10,000 / 50,000  (558,000)

What about Ukrainian casualties?

Ukraine has been considerably more proficient at keeping data under wraps than Russia, so getting an accurate count requires looking for some hard numbers and establishing some relationship. One such number is amputations. Amputation rates (amputations per total casualties, or amputations relative to KIAs, remain fairly steady for any given war, once the war “settles” into some sort of standard operating procedures. As medevac procedures improve from one war to another, soldiers with extreme wounds survive, and then survive and limbs can be saved. Thus, for the US Civil War, there were an estimated 60,000 amputees for some 720,000 dead, 1 to 12. By the time we get to the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, we see some 1,300 amputees for 6,800 dead, about 1 to 5. Simply put, a soldier with a wound severe enough to warrant an amputation was more than twice as likely to die during the Civil War than in Iraq. 

This would suggest that for every amputee in the Ukrainian army, 5 or more soldiers have been killed. For the sake of erring on the low side, I’ll use 4 to 1.

How many Ukrainian amputees have there been?

In the first 6 months of 2023 there were 15,000. By August of 2023 the largest maker of prosthetic limbs in Europe put the number at “over 50,000” since February 2022 Last fall the number of amputees was said to be “over 90,000,” which would translate into more than 360,000 dead; I’ll use 350,000.

But is there any other data that supports such a number?

At the beginning of the war Ukraine had an army - active and reserve - of 400,000 troops. Within days of the invasion martial law was declared and the army mobilized. With the exception of a few, select cases, no one has been dismissed from the army since then. Several different numbers have been used by officials in the government as to the size of the army and the rate of inductions. 

In the summer of 2023 figures varied from 880,000 to 1,280,000 troops actually in uniform. Assuming that the number of 880,000 in the summer of 2023 (when they began the counter-offensive) is accurate, and adding in perhaps 50,000 non-recoverable casualties (killed or severely wounded) they were taking in some 33,000 troops per month. At that point, 930,000 had been in the military. Since then, using the government number of 27,000 inductees per month, 30 months, some 810,000 more have been added to the military. This brings the total to 1,690,000. The UGS is using the number 900,000 right now. That means 790,000 losses. Perhaps 10,000 are POWs, so 780,000. 200,000 are deserters (or missing). That leaves 580,000 killed or severely wounded and out of the army, yields 265,000 killed, 315,000 severely wounded, using a 4 to 1 wounded to killed ratio. A number within the same magnitude as the numbers derived from the amputation numbers, and numbers that are of similar size as the Russian casualty numbers. (I used a 4 to 1 ratio vice 3 to 1 for the Russians to reflect a slightly better medical care process - which could be incorrect. If so, the number of Ukrainian dead would increase, and the number of severely wounded would decrease.)

This gives the Ukrainian casualty count, using the same arrangement, though I only have a lower and upper limit for Ukraine): KIA / Severely wounded / Wounded returning to active duty / POWs / deserters) and Non-recoverable losses (killed + severely wounded + POWs + deserters)

Low

265,000 / 315,000 / 745,000 / 10,000 / 200,000 (880,000)

High

350,000 / 420,000 / 980,000 / 10,000 / 200,000  (980,000)

So, there is a case to be made that the numbers as presented are simply not correct, particularly in the case of Ukraine. But what this really points at is that body counts are a horrible metric.

The record of governments stretching the truth even to themselves, massaging definitions and in some cases just flat making things up is a long one. Anyone who doubts this needs to go search on line for “Vietnam Body Count Controversy" and then spend a little time reading various search results. Add to this, that the definition of “Killed In Action” varies from country to country and results in interesting situations where, for example, the average American will tell you that “more than 58,000 soldiers [the term used generically] were killed in the Vietnam War.” But the Pentagon will tell you that there 47,000 killed in action. 

A number of years ago I ran across one allied government that, in order to avoid reporting “combat deaths,” defined ‘Killed in action” as "dying of wounds on the battlefield.” A soldier who died while in a MEDEVAC helo was therefore, not KIA, not a combat death.

So, the first issue is this: numbers from the governments are not to be blindly trusted.

I add that I have zero knowledge of whatever might be collected by various intelligence agencies, and certainly everyone would love to know what the other side is passing up echelon as to the casualties they inflicted on the enemy and the number of men their own units have lost. But even here, unit commanders regularly stretch the truth, inflating the and deflating numbers as it seems best.

Agains, from Vietnam, Gen. Creighton Abrams:

Body count may have been the most corrupt – and corrupting – measure of progress in the whole mess. Certainly the consensus of senior Army leaders, the generals who commanded in Vietnam, strongly indicates that it was. A survey found that sixty-one percent of officers believed that the body count was often inflated. Typical comments by the respondents were that it was 'a fake – totally worthless', that 'the immensity of the false reporting is a blot on the honor of the Army', and that they were grossly exaggerated by many units primarily because of the incredible interest shown by people like McNamara and Westmoreland.

And, of course, we “won” the body count war. As for the actual war… 

Where does that leave us?

To begin, there is ample evidence to show that the numbers in the analysis are wrong, and probably too low in the case of Ukraine and too high in the case of Russia. More to the point, they are of the same order of magnitude, which can’t be good for a country with 1/5th the population.

This is a very bloody war: yes it is. But wars are not won by latching on to the right metric. President Zelenskyy recently opined that the goal of Ukraine will be to kill 50,000 Russians per month. Besides being unlikely, it misses the fundamental nature of war: war is a struggle of will.

Body counts are not only almost always inaccurate, they are a terrible metric of success.

While the propagandists in Kyiv (and in other capitals in Europe) churn out numbers, there are other, disturbing data points: more than 200,000 desertions in the Ukrainian army (the Russian army figure is 50,000). The 2 million young men of Ukraine who are, per the Ukrainian Minister of Defense, missing. Perhaps half have already left the country, the other half have gone into hiding. And the Ukrainian population, which   has been steadily shrinking from 25, is expected to drop to one-half its current size in the next 10 to 15 years.

If you think it isn’t still happening, consider this: in August 2025 the law was changed to allow Ukrainian men aged 18 - 22 to leave the country. By the end of October more than 100,000 (of 700,000 total) had left the country. 

Is this a country whose will is vibrant and intact? Or a country that is simply trying to endure?

This leads to the much more important - and more readily stated - second point: this war, since fall of 2022, after Russian forces had been pushed back across the Dnepr, and pushed east across the Oskil River, has, at the tactical and operational level, not been about ground gained or held. From a grand strategic level Russia wants Ukraine, that much is obvious.  But no matter what they say, the way this war is being fought it is a war of attrition. The goal an any given day for the Russians is simply to cause casualties and break the population of Ukraine. And the real hard number - 31 million people in the country, and a projection of just half that in 10 years, is the one key demonstration that, at the tactical and operational level of war, they - the Russians - are not losing.

The argument that Russia will not take Ukraine for 40 years at its current pace of ground gained suggests that the Ukrainian strategy should be to simply hold on and wait for the Russian economy and army to collapse. But in the meantime Ukraine’s population continues to shrink, and the economy becomes more and more twisted into a false economy held aloft by grants and gifts from the West. Russia wants to destroy Ukraine. There is much about the current European strategy that sadly enables that Russian goal.

The study seems to suggest that Russia is a falling apart, the Russian army can’t endure, and that Ukraine need only hold on another year or two and they can win. But I suggest that looking at the problem with a “wider aperture” paints a different picture.

v/r pete