- Category
- Latest news
Russia Lost 31,700 Troops in First Month of 2026—9,000 More Than It Recruited
- Authors
![Photo of Dariia Mykhailenko]( "Photo of Dariia Mykhailenko")
In January, total Russian military losses amounted to 31,700 personnel, exceeding the number of reinforcements added to Russian units during the same period by 9,000.
According to Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi on February 9, this trend is expected to continue.
We bring you stories from the ground. Your support keeps our team in the field.
“During a frank discussion, we analyzed the state of implementation of combat and operational tasks, including repelling enemy air strikes, manning and supplying our forces, carrying out engineering and fortification work, and maintaining law and order within the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” the commander-in-chief said.
He also reported that in January Ukrainian forces carried out 48 fire missions against Russia’s oil and gas sector using DeepStrike capabilities. As a result, oil refining volumes in Russia decreased by 19%, or 53.4 million tons on an annualized basis.
At the same time, Syrskyi said Ukraine’s air defense forces destroyed 21,700 aerial targets in January, including 21,600 Russian drones of various types, despite an ongoing shortage of interception assets.
The figures cited by Syrskyi align with broader assessments by international analysts of Russia’s mounting losses on the battlefield.
-fc33a3ba260f27e6075990ca8dc8e231.jpeg)
According to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Russia has incurred extraordinarily high personnel losses in its war against Ukraine while achieving only limited territorial advances. CSIS estimates that Russian forces have suffered nearly 1.2 million casualties since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, marking the highest losses sustained by a major power in a single conflict since World War II.
The analysis estimates that in 2025 alone, Russia lost around 415,000 soldiers killed or wounded, an average of roughly 35,000 casualties per month. Of the overall total since the invasion began, as many as 315,000 Russian troops are believed to have been killed.
-048987b1cb8d32e4786971ae6cd0f55f.png)
“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, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia would need no less than two years to take control of East of Ukraine and would have to lose about 800,000 troops in the process.
-457ad7ae19a951ebdca94e9b6bf6309d.png)
-72b63a4e0c8c475ad81fe3eed3f63729.jpeg "Photo of Cyril Barabaltchouk")
