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 hit 2 million by spring, with Russia suffering the highest recorded troop death toll of any major power in any conflict since World War II.
Tuesday’s report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies comes less than a month before the fourth anniversary of Moscow’s February 24 all-out invasion of Ukraine.
As the war moves through another cold winter, Russian strikes hit an apartment block on the outskirts of Kiev on Wednesday, killing two people. Nine others were injured in attacks in the Ukrainian cities of Odesa and Kryvyi Rih and in the frontline Zaporizhzhia region.
The CSIS report said Russia suffered 1.2 million casualties, including up to 325,000 troop deaths, between February 2022 and December 2025.
“Despite claims of battlefield momentum in Ukraine, the data show that Russia is paying an extraordinary price for minimal gains and is declining as a major power,” the report said. “No major power has suffered anywhere near these numbers of casualties or fatalities in any war since World War II.”
It is estimated that Ukraine, with its smaller army and population, had suffered between 500,000 and 600,000 military casualties, including up to 140,000 deaths.
Neither Moscow nor Kiev provide timely data on military losses, and each side seeks to inflate the other side’s casualties.
Commenting on the report, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday that the research could not be considered “reliable information” and that only Russia’s Defense Ministry was authorized to provide information on military losses.
The ministry’s last statement on battlefield deaths was in September 2022, when it said just under 6,000 Russian soldiers had been killed. No updated figures have been released since then.
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 war began.
The report estimated that at current rates, combined Russian and Ukrainian casualties could be as high as 1.8 million and could reach 2 million by spring.
The figures from CSIS were compiled using the Washington DC-based think tank’s own analysis, data published by independent Russian news site Mediazona with the BBC, estimates from the British government and interviews with state officials.
A war of attrition
Reports of military casualties have been suppressed in the Russian media, activists and independent journalists say.
Mediazona, together with the BBC and a team of volunteers, has so far collected the names of over 160,000 soldiers killed by scouring news reports, social media and government websites.
The report also said that Russian forces have been advancing at a slow pace since seizing the initiative on the battlefield in 2024, despite their vastly larger size.
Russia’s advance into Ukraine has largely ended in a grinding war of attrition, and analysts say Russian President Vladimir Putin is in no rush to find a solution, despite his army’s difficulties on 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 prominent 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 news conference last month that 700,000 Russian soldiers are fighting in Ukraine. He gave the same number in 2024, and a slightly lower figure — 617,000 — in December 2023. It was not possible to verify those figures.
2 died in an attack in the Kiev region
Officials said Wednesday that two people were killed near the Ukrainian capital and at least nine others were wounded in attacks across Ukraine.
A man and a woman died in an overnight attack in the Bilohorodka area on the outskirts of Kyiv, according to Mykola Kalashnyk, head of the regional military administration.
Officials in the Ukrainian cities of Odesa and Kryvyi Rih, as well as in the Zaporizhzhia region, also reported Russian strikes overnight, which injured at least nine people and damaged infrastructure.
Ukraine’s air force said Russia attacked overnight with one 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 destroyed 75 Ukrainian drones overnight. Twenty-four were killed on Russia’s southwestern Krasnodar region, with another 23 killed on the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia illegally annexed in 2016.
Two drones were reportedly shot down over Russia’s Voronezh region, where Ukraine’s General Staff said on Wednesday it struck the Khokholskaya oil depot. Regional Governor Alexander Gusev wrote on Telegram that the debris of a fallen drone sparked a fire involving oil products, but he did not give more details.