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In a sign of the Ukraine war coming to a middle, Zelensky has admitted that Ukraine has as many as 100,000 KIA.
More serious estimates based on firepower disparity, individual unit losses and amputees put the estimate far higher, at 300-500K, with about a minimum at around 200K.
As was expected earlier, Trump's admin is not serious about ending this war and Russians confident they can see it out and settle for a Ukraine without foreign forces on it.
I wouldn’t mind seeing more about those serious estimates. The one you linked is methodological and doesn’t provide a total.
Other than that, I generally agree. Trump’s personal aesthetics don’t really care about foreign casualties. He’s going to manage Ukraine in whatever way serves his domestic politics, so previous support is probably a high-water mark. It’s not going to get any harder for Russia.
There's all kinds floating around - Wikipedia has at least a partial list of official ish ones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War#Total_casualties which put Ukraine at 80k military KIA as of Feb 2024 and Russia at 160k ish, for low bounds, but the propaganda numbers for each side go up 800k Russian KIA according to the Ukrainians and just under 1,000,000 KIA and wounded for Ukraine as per the Russians.
I think around a 2:1 Russian to Ukrainian deaths seems plausible, though others have disagreed. I don't particularly rate the method linked in the OP, purely because if Ukraine actually had taken that many KIA it would be already collapsing and the evidence would be everywhere. Similarly for Russia - 800k KIA is too high. So, we're reduced to estimates of obituaries, excess deaths etc which are more solid but likely an underestimate, or arguing about likely ratios from casualty clearing, fires ratios, fires accuracy, anecdotes, the fact Russia is on the offensive, equipment deficits and so on - which could give us a plausible estimate if you trust the logic and person doing it, but is super open to accusations of being propaganda or being rigged by both camps.
Not sure if that helps?
Official Ukrainian numbers (which are 933k+ as of today) are for casualties (the term that is used in the MoD reports is "combat losses"). Casualties include killed, wounded, captured, and missing.
Oh, totally misread that. That's actually fairly credible although on the high end as an estimate I would guess, I take back my accusations of them also selling obviously silly numbers. However a full million out of the Russian workforce would leave more ripples than we have seen I would assume, like this interview suggested (from December, but his point about a million losses being impossible to hide presumably still stands): https://frontelligence.substack.com/p/war-deficits-and-the-russian-economy
A million casualties doesn't necessarily mean a million individual people, some portion of that figure would be people who have been wounded multiple times.
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Ukrainian OSINT guys counting memorials and such info claim RU KIA is 100k based on memorial messages and 165k based on probate data.
https://en.zona.media/article/2025/03/28/casualties_eng-trl
I would be very interested in your estimates, defined as you wish (KIA, KIA+wounded too badly to return to service or whatever) for both sides. What kind of ratio do you think it is?
Probably at least 2:1 in favor of Russians. Might be more depending on how good / bad their artillery has been throughout the conflict. Remember 2% of people in this war die to bullets. Rest is artillery and drones. Some say it's more than 5:1 but I doubt it.
Russians also did clever and unscrupulous things like lightly training their criminals and then expending them in Bakhmut against the better Ukrainian forces. They'd use drones to direct these guys close - Ukrainians who revealed themselves by fighting would get blasted. Most of the convicts died but that was okay - they paid their debt to society that way. The kill ratio wasn't too bad, it was maybe 1-2 convicts pre one Ukrainian soldier.
Do you think it's consistent to have A) a 2:1 ratio in favor of Russia, B) Russia possessing a larger military C) Russia unable to achieve an operational breakthrough since early 2022? I think A) can't exist with both B) and C), but I assume you have another thought on that? Is there a precedent for a larger army on the offensive being unable to advance (and even losing ground in mid to late 2022) despite killing at a 2:1 ratio?
There's also A) a 2:1 ratio in favor of Russia, with D) Oryx (or whatever other open source counting wrecks) showing vastly more equipment losses for Russia, but I assume you would discount that as Ukraine being less mechanized, or Russian footage not being available?
However, no worries if you don't want to go into the weeds on this, I really think we can't finally resolve it until the war ends.
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Yes, these are high end of credible estimates.
Take into account that a significant fraction of these numbers are prisoners and there is a non-negligible number of non-Russians, mostly LPR/DPR (some volunteers but mostly conscripts) and a small number of North Koreans. These all are of the order of 200-250k. And there are ripples: there is a significant increase in wages for men in Russia.
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Why would a the same size army with fewer weapons have fewer deaths ? By all accounts the front is about sitting in a trench and getting killed by arty and drones, or sitting out in the field and getting killed by same. Has been that way for the last 1.5 years.
The complaint that Russians won't even fight you but will just try to kill you with drones every hour of every day. Since they have more drones, it follows they can kill more. (the drone segment is 2/3rs thru the article) https://meduza.io/en/feature/2025/03/27/please-don-t-use-my-name
There was the vaunted Ukrainian counter-offensive into heavy minefields and defensive lines - encountered some problems. That's where the famous collection of destroyed armor photo was shot.
I think it's reasonable to say that Ukraine has been defending more than on the offensive? And there are plenty of photos of hundreds of Russian vehicles lost in single pushes from early war if you're worried about the losses shown for Ukraine - the high IQ pontooning meme was a direct offshoot of literally 100+ vehicles being lost as an entire BTG funneled into a kill zone like lemmings. Ukraine's offensive was wildly optimistic and took several company size losses of metal, but it was an outlier, one that they stopped and Zaluzhny should be credited for containing once it was clear there was no hole in the lines like at Kharkiv or Kherson.
All I'm saying is that there are several credible reasons why the Ukrainian military would be perfectly plausibly taking fewer casualties than Russia, while still being under a lot of pressure.
Your post seemed to put credibility on the estimate that Ukraine has taken over 300,000k combat KIA/out of the fight? Where would you put it? I'm guessing at that level or higher? Where do you think Russia's are at?
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