THAT EVEN a short ceasefire could not hold is evidence the war in Ukraine is unlikely to end soon. Both sides accused the other of repeated violations between May 9th and 11th—and our war tracker, which uses satellite systems to detect the location and intensity of war-related fires, showed no meaningful decline in fighting. Yet the tide of the conflict looks to be turning. Russia’s death toll remains extraordinarily high, and its spring offensive has stalled. Indeed, our analysis suggests that this year it has suffered small but sustained territorial losses for the first time since October 2023.
Russia’s Su-25 jet aircraft release smoke in the colours of the Russian state flag during the Victory Day military parade in Moscow, on May 9 (AP)
We estimate that by May 12th between 280,000 and 518,000 Russian soldiers had been killed, with total casualties (including wounded) of between 1.1m and 1.5m—meaning that around 3% of Russia’s pre-war male population of fighting age has been killed or wounded. Our calculations combine credible casualty estimates from intelligence agencies, defence officials and independent researchers with data from our war tracker, which allows us to model daily death tolls based on the intensity of combat. Reliable estimates for Ukrainian losses remain too sparse for comparable modelling. But a single estimate from CSIS, a think-tank, puts total casualties at up to 600,000 by December, including 100,000-140,000 dead, a higher share of its pre-war population than Russia.
Our recent analysis includes new numbers from Meduza and Mediazona, two exiled Russian news outlets. Their database contains more than 218,000 individually identified soldiers killed in the war, painstakingly compiled from obituaries, social-media posts and local news reports. They then combine this with inheritance records, using the gap between the two databases to estimate how many deaths have gone unrecorded. More recently they have added court rulings that declare soldiers as missing or dead without a body having been recovered.
This grim toll is coming with few gains on the front lines. Mapping the battlefield has become increasingly difficult as it has become more dispersed. Ukrainian drones are stalking troops far behind the front line, making it harder for Russia to move units to the front without becoming targets. Some sources suggest Russian forces are still slowly gaining ground. Our tracker, which uses maps of the battlefield from ISW, a think-tank, suggests that Russian forces have captured around 220 square kilometres this year, or just 0.04% of Ukraine’s territory. But recently Ukraine has begun to claw back ground: a 30-day moving average shows it has recaptured around 189 square kilometres. Russia may be stalling before a summer push. This may also be a turning-point in the war.
