Operational overview: Ukraine contact line (approximate) and cumulative Russian equipment and personnel losses as of April 26, 2026. Source: Ukraine General Staff / CSIS. Map: Strategy Battles.

Ukraine’s General Staff reported on April 26, 2026 that Russian forces have sustained 1,325,650 personnel casualties since the full-scale invasion began on February 24, 2022. The figure includes 960 losses recorded in the preceding 24-hour period alone. It is a number so large that it is difficult to contextualise without historical comparison — and those comparisons are unflattering for Moscow.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies published a detailed analysis in January 2026 estimating that Russia had suffered close to 1.2 million casualties by the end of December 2025 — more than any major military power in any conflict since the Second World War. Ukraine’s General Staff figure, which covers a later date and includes killed, wounded and missing, has now surpassed that estimate.

These numbers come from the Ukrainian side and carry the caveat that wartime figures from any participant are subject to dispute. Russia does not publish equivalent casualty data. Independent verification at this scale is not possible. However, the scale of the figures is broadly consistent with independent Western assessments and with what has been observed of Russian recruitment, mobilisation pressure and operational tempo since 2022.

Ukraine’s General Staff publishes daily equipment loss figures alongside personnel casualties. The cumulative totals as of April 26 paint a picture of extraordinary attrition across every domain. Russia has lost 11,892 tanks and 24,463 armoured combat vehicles since February 2022. It has lost 40,711 artillery systems, 1,753 multiple launch rocket systems and 1,354 air defence systems.

The air war figures are equally striking. Russia has lost 435 aircraft and 350 helicopters to Ukrainian air defences. The drone figure — 258,091 destroyed — reflects both the scale of Russian drone usage in the campaign and the intensity of Ukrainian countermeasures, including the development of dedicated electronic warfare and intercept capability.

At sea, Russia has lost 33 ships and boats and, remarkably, two submarines. Both submarine losses occurred in the Black Sea. The figures collectively represent a degradation of Russian military capacity on a scale that has no precedent in post-World War II history, even accounting for their disputed origin.

The daily figure of 960 casualties matters not just as a data point but as an indicator of rate. In February 2026, Britain’s deputy ambassador to the OSCE stated publicly that Russian military losses were now exceeding sustainable recruitment and replacement rates. That was before Russia’s March 2026 casualty spike: Ukrainian President Zelensky confirmed that Russian losses in March alone exceeded 35,000 killed or wounded, the highest monthly total since the invasion began.

A January 2026 CSIS analysis estimated that by the end of 2025, Russia had lost between 250,000 and 300,000 soldiers killed in action, with total casualties of close to 1.2 million. The report concluded that Russia has suffered more fatalities in Ukraine in just over three years than in all Russian and Soviet conflicts combined between the end of World War II and 2022. That is a span of 77 years of warfare compressed into a single campaign.

The CSIS analysis estimated the casualty ratio at between 2:1 and 2.5:1 in Ukraine’s favour — meaning Russia has suffered significantly more losses per engagement than Ukraine. An Economist analysis from October 2025 put the killed-in-action ratio even higher, suggesting roughly five Russian soldiers have died for every Ukrainian in 2025.

Russia has held the battlefield initiative in Ukraine since approximately January 2024, but the rate of advance has been historically negligible. CSIS calculated that in the Avdiivka-to-Pokrovsk corridor — one of the most active recent Russian offensives — Russian forces advanced just under 50 kilometres from February 2024 to January 2026, at an average pace of approximately 70 metres per day. That is slower than Allied advances during the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

In the Kupiansk and Chasiv Yar sectors, the advance has been even more constrained. Since the full-scale invasion, Russia has seized approximately 75,000 square kilometres and controls around 120,000 square kilometres of Ukrainian territory including pre-2022 occupations such as Crimea and parts of Donbas. Overall, that represents roughly a 12 percent increase in Russian-controlled Ukrainian territory since 2022, achieved at the cost of over 1.3 million personnel casualties and the destruction of tens of thousands of pieces of military equipment.

Ukraine’s General Staff has not released its own total casualty figures, citing operational security. CSIS estimated that Ukraine had suffered between 500,000 and 600,000 casualties — including killed, wounded and missing — by the end of 2025, with between 100,000 and 140,000 soldiers killed in action over the same period. Independent tracking projects had documented the named deaths of over 91,000 Ukrainian fighters by early April 2026, a figure understood to represent a significant undercount of actual KIA.

The gap between Russian and Ukrainian casualty figures, if accurate, reflects a range of factors: the advantages of defensive warfare, Ukraine’s effective exploitation of Western weapons systems and training, and the particular vulnerabilities of Russian infantry tactics, which have relied on poorly trained assault groups rather than combined-arms manoeuvre. The war has exposed structural weaknesses in Russian military doctrine that persist despite four years of wartime adaptation.