Russia Has Suffered 1.3 Million Troop Casualties Since Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine, NATO Official

Russia has lost approximately 1.3 million troops killed or wounded since launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a senior NATO official said on February 11 during a briefing to a Deutsche Welle correspondent.

According to the official, around 400,000 Russian soldiers were killed or injured 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 unusually high number of irrecoverable casualties is largely due to inadequate battlefield medical care within the Russian armed forces.

Separate analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), similarly concluded that Russia has incurred extraordinarily heavy losses while achieving only limited territorial advances. CSIS estimates that Russian forces have suffered nearly 1.2 million casualties since February 2022, marking what it describes as the highest losses sustained by any major power in a single conflict since World War II.

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War in Ukraine

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In 2025 alone, Russia is believed to have lost approximately 415,000 troops killed or wounded—an average of about 35,000 casualties per month. Of the total losses since the start of the invasion, up to 315,000 Russian service members are estimated to have been killed.

“Russian casualties and fatalities are also remarkable from a historical Russian and Soviet perspective. Russian battlefield fatalities in Ukraine are more than 17 times greater than Soviet fatalities in Afghanistan during the 1980s, 11 times greater than during Russia’s First and Second Chechen Wars in the 1990s and 2000s, respectively, and over five times greater than all Russian and Soviet wars combined since World War II,” CSIS noted.

Earlier, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said that Russia endured devastating battlefield losses in December 2025, with daily fatalities reaching up to 1,000 troops.

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