"Incredible Numbers."
- 28.01.2026, 6:22
American experts have named the number of losses of the Russian occupiers.
Russian army losses reached 1.198 million by the end of the fourth year of the war in Ukraine, experts at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) calculated in an annual report.
In one 2025 year, Russian troops lost 425,000 killed and wounded, an average of about 35,000 per month. Among the losses since the beginning of the war, up to 315 thousand people have been killed, which is comparable to the population of cities such as Smolensk, Belgorod or Chita.
"These figures are incredible. None of the world's leading countries suffered such losses in any of the wars since World War II," CSIS analysts wrote. For example, the U.S. lost 54.4 thousand men killed in the Korean War, 47.3 thousand in the Vietnam War, and only 2.4 thousand during operations in Afghanistan.
In Ukraine, the Russian army lost 17 times more soldiers than the Soviet army in Afghanistan, 11 times more than in both Chechen wars, and 5 times more than in all wars in which Russia and the USSR participated after 1945.
At the cost of enormous losses over the past two years, Russian generals have managed to increase the area under their control by only 8.4 thousand square kilometers: 0.6% of Ukraine's territory was captured in 2024 and another 0.8% in 2025.
The pace of advance of Russian troops was even lower than during the battles of the First World War. From Avdeevka to Chasov Yar from February 2024 to January 2026, the Russian army moved at a rate of 15 meters per day; the rate of advance on Kupyansk, which has been going on since November 2024, was 23 meters per day; on Pokrovsk - 70 meters per day.
Russian troops have not managed to seize all the territories that the Kremlin annexed after the "referendums" in 2022: now they control 20% of Ukraine, or 120 thousand square kilometers. At the same time, directly during the military campaign they captured 12% of the Ukrainian territory, or 75 thousand square kilometers, according to CSIS.
The Red Army during the Great Patriotic War took 1394 days from the beginning of Operation Barbarossa to reach Berlin. Russia barely reached Pokrovsk, 500 km from Kiev, during the same period, CSIS analysts wrote.
The high losses and slow territorial gains clearly point to Russia's weakening, said Seth Jones, head of the CSIS Defense and Security Department. Russia's economic losses are also indicative of this, he emphasizes: industrial production outside the military-industrial complex is declining, GDP growth last year is estimated at only 0.6 percent, and access to technology has been cut by sanctions.
"Russia's woeful performance on the battlefield in Ukraine and declining economic performance indicate Russia's serious decline as a major power," Jones notes. While Russia still possesses nuclear weapons and a large army, it is no longer a great power in most military, economic, and scientific and technological categories."