Camilla Jessen
NATO official says Russia has suffered 1.3 million casualties in Ukraine.
According to a senior NATO official speaking to a Deutsche Welle correspondent, Russia has lost approximately 1.3 million troops killed or injured since launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The figure was shared during a briefing on 11 February.
The official said about 400,000 of those casualties occurred in 2025 alone.
“We are surprised by the proportion of fatalities in Russian losses. The Russians are suffering disproportionately high losses, they are sustaining extremely heavy losses,” he said.
He added that the high number of irrecoverable casualties is partly due to what he described as inadequate battlefield medical care within the Russian armed forces.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte previously said that in December 2025 alone, Russia was experiencing up to 1,000 fatalities per day.
Independent assessments
Separate analysis from the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has reached similar conclusions about the scale of Russian losses.
CSIS estimates that Russian forces have suffered nearly 1.2 million casualties since February 2022. Of those, up to 315,000 are believed to have been killed.
For 2025 alone, CSIS estimates around 415,000 Russian troops were killed or wounded — roughly 35,000 per month.
The think tank described the losses as the highest sustained by any major power in a single conflict since the Second World War.
Historical comparisons
CSIS also compared the reported losses to previous Russian and Soviet conflicts.
According to its analysis, Russian battlefield deaths in Ukraine are more than 17 times higher than Soviet fatalities during the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
They are also said to be 11 times higher than during Russia’s First and Second Chechen wars and more than five times greater than the combined total of Russian and Soviet war deaths since 1945.
What Russia says
Moscow rarely publishes updated casualty figures and has not publicly confirmed the numbers cited by NATO or CSIS.
Independent verification of battlefield casualties remains difficult, with both sides accused of downplaying their own losses and inflating those of their opponents.
Sources: Deutsche Welle, Center for Strategic and International Studies, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, United24 Media
