Ukraine’s General Staff put the number at 600,470. That was its tally of Russian military casualties between February 24, 2022 and August 19, 2024, and it included 1,120 soldiers it said were killed or wounded in the previous 24 hours alone. Ukrinform carried the figures, which the General Staff had posted on Facebook.
The catch is whose arithmetic this is. Kyiv has every reason to count generously, and the equipment list that came with it should be read the same way. By the General Staff’s count, Russia had lost 8,513 tanks, 16,495 armored fighting vehicles, 17,104 artillery systems, 367 warplanes, 328 helicopters and 13,809 tactical drones. It also claimed 28 warships and boats, plus one submarine.
Washington lands on the same number
An independent estimate arrived at the same place that autumn. On October 9, 2024, Pentagon officials told reporters that Russia had suffered more than 600,000 casualties, killed and wounded together, according to Army Times and Defense One. A senior U.S. defense official said September 2024 had been the deadliest month of the war for Russia, as its forces pushed through Donetsk toward the logistics hub of Pokrovsk against increasingly fortified positions.
The same official offered a comparison: “Russian losses, again both killed and wounded in action, in just the first year of the war exceeded the total of all Soviet losses in any conflict since World War 2 combined.”
What the losses bought
Not much ground. The Pentagon expects only “incremental gains,” a senior U.S. military official said, because Russia leans on numbers against solid defensive lines. “It’s kind of the Russian way of war where they continue to throw mass into the into the problem, and I think we’ll continue to see high losses.”
Equipment losses were piling up as well. The U.S. side cited 32 Black Sea naval vessels damaged or destroyed and about two-thirds of Russia’s pre-war tank inventory gone. Moscow had started pulling Soviet-era equipment out of warehouses to refurbish it. Ukrainian drone strikes, the official added, had destroyed “hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition” from Russian and North Korean stockpiles.
Paying for manpower
The Kremlin avoided a mass mobilization. “Putin is trying to avoid a mass mobilization because of the effect that would have on Russia’s domestic population,” the Defense One report quoted the U.S. official as saying. Instead Russia raised soldier pay and pensions and lowered recruitment standards. John Herbst of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center called the reluctance “a potential point of vulnerability for the regime,” adding that “The Russian people are not in this war.”
Sources
- Russia casualties reach 600,000 during war in Ukraine, Pentagon says (Army Times, Noah Robertson)
- Russia's war casualties in Ukraine exceed 600,000 (Ukrinform)
- Russian casualties have topped 600K, US says (Defense One)
