section_path: Casualties
section_name: Casualties
paragraph_text: Casualties
  
  Russian and Ukrainian sources have been said to inflate casualty numbers for opposing forces and downplay their own losses for morale. Leaked US documents say "under-reporting of casualties within the system highlights the military's 'continuing reluctance' to convey bad news up the chain of command." Russian news outlets have largely stopped reporting the Russian death toll. Russia and Ukraine have admitted suffering "significant" and "considerable" losses, respectively.
  
  The numbers of civilian and military deaths have been impossible to determine precisely. Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported that neither it nor independent conflict monitors could verify Russian and Ukrainian claims of enemy losses and suspected they were inflated. In October 2022, the independent Russian media project iStories, citing sources close to the Kremlin, reported that more than 90,000 Russian soldiers had been killed, seriously wounded, or gone missing.
  
  While combat deaths can be inferred from a variety of sources, including satellite imagery of military action, measuring civilian deaths is more difficult. In June 2022, the Ukrainian Minister of Defence told CNN that tens of thousands of Ukrainians had died, and he hoped the death toll was below 100,000. By July 2024, about 20,000 Ukrainians had lost limbs. In the destroyed city of Mariupol, Ukrainian officials believe at least 25,000 have been killed, and bodies were still being discovered in September 2022. The mayor said over 10,000 and possibly as many as 20,000 civilians died in the siege of Mariupol and Russian forces had brought mobile cremation equipment with them when they entered the city. An investigation by AP from the end of 2022 estimated up to 75,000 killed civilians in the Mariupol area alone. AFP says "a key gap in casualty counts is the lack of information from Russian-occupied places like the port city of Mariupol, where tens of thousands of civilians are believed to have died". There were at least 8,000 excess deaths in Mariupol between March 2022-February 2023. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) reports similar issues and believed the true civilian casualty numbers were significantly higher than it has been able to confirm.
  
  In the Russian military, ethnic minorities have suffered disproportionately high casualties. In October 2022, the Russian regions with the highest death tolls were Dagestan, Tuva and Buryatia, all minority regions. In February 2024, six out of ten Russian regions with the highest mortality rates in Ukraine were located in Siberia and the far east, and ethnic minorities continuing outsized casualty rates prompted analysts to warn that the situation will lead to long-term destructive impacts on these communities. About 1,200 Russian soldiers were killed or wounded in Ukraine every day in May–June 2024, which climbed to 1,500 by November 2024, when 45,690 casualties were estimated that month. Newsweek estimated that on the bloodiest day in November 2024 the ratio of killed Russian men (1,950) exceeded the average daily male birth rate in Russia (1,836). Latvia-based news outlet Meduza estimated that up to 140,000 Russian soldiers had died by July 2024.
  
  The Russian invasion became the deadliest European war in the last 80 years, surpassing the Bosnian War. Ukrainian average mortality rate was 8.7/1000 people in 2020, and jumped to 18.6 in 2024, whereas Russia's mortality rate was 14/1000, ranking them as #1 and #9, of countries with the highest mortality rates. In August 2024, Haaretz estimated 172,000 people had died in the Russian invasion. In February 2025, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft estimated 250,000 dead. In September 2024, the Wall Street Journal reported that there were now one million Ukrainians and Russians who were killed or wounded; it noted how the number of casualties impacts the countries' shrinking prewar populations.