The human cost of President Vladimir Putin‘s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been laid bare according to one estimate that said the tally of casualties had passed seven figures.
Since the Russian president launched the war on February 24, 2022, more than 1 million people on both sides have been either killed or injured, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited unnamed intelligence sources.
An exact number on those killed and wounded in the conflict is difficult to come by, with both sides not releasing official estimates. Newsweek has contacted the Russian and Ukrainian Defense Ministries via email for comment.
As of Tuesday, Kyiv’s estimate of Russian casualties, which includes those killed and wounded, stood at 635,880. Moscow has not updated its tally since it said in September 2022 that just under 6,000 of its soldiers had been killed.
A funeral of six Ukrainian servicemen in Sumy, northeastern Ukraine, on August 15, 2024. The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that 1 million Russian and Ukrainian troops had been killed or wounded since the start of the war in February 2022.
ROMAN PILIPEY/Getty Images
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in February 2024 that around 31,000 of his country’s soldiers had been killed.
However, former political and security officials told the WSJ that this was likely to be an underestimate to placate the population and help to continue mobilizing recruits. The newspaper reported Tuesday that a confidential Kyiv estimate from earlier this year had instead put the number of Ukrainian troops killed at 80,000 and the number of those wounded at 400,000, according to people familiar with the matter.
Western intelligence estimates cited by the WSJ claimed 200,000 Russian troops had been killed and 600,000 wounded—making a total of more than 1 million casualties on both sides. Earlier this month, United Nations acting under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, Joyce Msuya, said more than 11,700 civilians had been killed.
The Ukrainian population in the territories controlled by Kyiv has decreased to between 25 and 27 million people, down from 40 million before the war, according to estimates from the Ukrainian government obtained by the WSJ.
There are also more than 10 million people who have forcibly displaced in the war, which has exacerbated a demographic crisis, especially given that Ukraine was already facing low fertility rates before the invasion.
The Ukrainian website Opendatabot, which cited figures from Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice, said that in the first half of this year, there were 250,972 deaths recorded—more than three times higher than the 87,655 births.
Massimo Diana, the United Nations Population Fund’s representative in Ukraine, told Newsweek last month that in Ukraine women have been the most affected, “particularly for women of childbearing age who are either unable or unwilling to start their families under the conditions of war.”
“The population movement, separation of the family and the stress that comes with the war have further reduced birthrates as well as increased the challenges for giving birth,” he said. These factors “create an environment that is actually quite bleak for the population’s recovery in the near future.”
Citing unnamed Kyiv officials, the WSJ said that Ukraine’s demographic situation was one of the main reasons why Zelensky had so far refrained from mobilizing men aged between 18 and 25, because they do not typically have children at that age and if they died or were incapacitated “demographic prospects would dim further.”
