From the very first days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin of Russia has maintained that Russia’s losses are far lower than Ukraine’s. Neither country releases casualty figures, but the western consensus is that the reverse is true. The Armed Forces of Ukraine and the UK Ministry of Defence estimate Russian casualties since February 2022 at around 1.2 million.

Has Russia really sacrificed more than a million people to conquer territory the size of West Virginia?

Reassuring the Russian public that the country’s “special military operation” was justified and is going well has had four rhetorical components. The first asserts that Russia, which launched an unprovoked invasion of its neighbor, is defending itself. Putin himself offers a second justification: that he had a right to invade because Ukraine isn’t even a country. The third claims, falsely, that Russia is gobbling up Ukrainian territory at high speed. The fourth states that the Russian army is taking territory without incurring excessive casualties. This is also untrue.

Public discussions of military losses often focus on those killed. But in professional military accounting, casualties include not only those killed but also the seriously wounded, individuals deemed unfit for service due to long-term injuries or psychological disorders, and those missing in action or discharged for medical reasons.

In February 2022, Russia deployed a significant number of troops to Ukraine. By most estimates, this initial contingent amounted to around 200,000 troops. It soon became clear that these forces were suffering significant losses. Since the beginning of the war, Russia has repeatedly poached specialists from aerospace and naval units to restaff depleted infantry battalions because routine rotations have been insufficient to maintain unit strength.

On Sept. 21, 2022, Russian leadership announced plans for a “partial mobilization” of 300,000 military reservists, a signal that existing personnel mechanisms could no longer compensate for combat losses. This move was controversial in Russia and triggered a rare wave of protests and emigration.

As in Ukraine, servicemen’s contracts are automatically extended while the war goes on. If a serviceman is no longer in the combat zone, he has been removed from service as a result of death, injury, or another war-related cause, not because he had enough and decided to quit.

Analysis of Russian budget expenditures suggests that in 2023, Russian authorities signed up 345,000 contract soldiers; in 2024, they recruited another 410,000. At the end of 2025, then head of Ukrainian military intelligence Kyrylo Budanov said Russia had added 403,000 “kontraktniki” to its ranks by December 2 and was aiming to recruit 409,000 in 2026.

An inflow of personnel on this scale suggests that since 2022, at least 1.7 million people have passed through the Russian military system. These figures are often touted as evidence of Russia’s ability to wage a protracted conflict.

However, Putin stated in December 2025 that around 700,000 Russian soldiers were deployed in Ukraine. What happened to the rest? Thus, even by official Russian accounts, the Russian Federation has absorbed more than 1 million casualties since invading Ukraine.

Putin’s regime has often cited Soviet achievements in World War II to illustrate Russians’ alleged willingness to suffer. But the differences between the two conflicts could not be more stark.

In World War II, the Soviet Union was the site of the largest land conflict in human history. At the peak of the Nazi invasion, Germany and its allies occupied about 656,000 square miles of Soviet territory. The Red Army recaptured it all, thereby shifting the war westward, and then occupied more than 385,000 square miles of Eastern and Central Europe. The price for this victory was catastrophically high. Red Army deaths were around 8.7 million people, to say nothing of the civilian toll of 18 to 20 million more dead.

Since Feb. 24, 2022, the Russian army has apparently suffered more than 1 million casualties to capture 29,000 square miles of Ukraine. (Russia had already seized 16,625 square miles when it occupied Crimea and the Donbass region between 2014 and 2022.) Soviet ruler Josef Stalin would have purged Putin for this kind of performance.

Yes, Russia is willing to continue fighting in Ukraine. Yes, Putin will throw more soldiers into the breach. Even conservative estimates suggest that each year is bloodier than the last for Russian soldiers. Is this winning?

Russian victory is not imminent or inevitable. But Putin’s grip on power depends on convincing everyone that it is.