Ukraine’s General Staff: Russia has lost over 1.53 million troops since the start of the invasion

Ukraine’s General Staff of the Armed Forces reported on September 28, 2026, that Russia has lost about 1,531,060 troops since the start of the full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, including 2,090 casualties in just the past day, The Kyiv Independent reports.

The updated tally also includes 12,385 tanks, 25,450 armored fighting vehicles, 154,735 vehicles and fuel tanks, 50,477 artillery systems, 2,165 multiple-launch rocket systems, 1,679 air defense systems, 443 aircraft, 356 helicopters, 2,774 unmanned ground vehicles, 35 ships and boats, as well as two submarines, according to data published by The Kyiv Independent.

Kyiv continues to withhold its own losses in personnel and equipment, citing wartime operational secrecy. However, independent Western assessments agree that Russian losses significantly exceed Ukrainian ones — the CSIS analytical center estimates the ratio at roughly 2.5 to 1 or 2 to 1.

A CSIS report published in January 2026 estimates that Ukraine suffered between 500,000 and 600,000 casualties from February 2022 to December 2025, of which 100,000 to 140,000 were soldiers killed in combat. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself said on February 4, in an interview with France TV, that at least 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, alongside a considerable number of missing soldiers.

The intensity of Russian drone strikes and front-line fighting has made it extremely difficult for Ukrainian forces to retrieve the bodies of fallen soldiers — a procedure necessary to confirm their identities through DNA analysis.