Zelensky: Russia Has Suffered Almost Eight Times More Combat Deaths Than Ukraine

Russia has experienced around one million casualties following its invasion of Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky said while asserting it was twice as many as suffered by Ukraine and with an even greater ratio when counting just fatalities.

Ukrainian combat casualties are comparatively rarely discussed in the West compared to Russian casualties, which are the subject of frequent speculation, estimates, and reviews. Given the opportunity to discuss these figures in an interview on Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asserted his position that Russia had seen nearly eight times as many deaths in the Ukraine war as Kyiv’s forces had.

Speaking to British journalist Piers Morgan, President Zelensky was asked straight whether U.S. President Donald Trump’s estimates of casualties on both sides of the war were accurate, and responded with figures that suggest a massive differential between Russian and Ukrainian deaths. He said: “Approximately around 350,000 Russians have been killed… further they have around 600-700,000 wounded”.

President Zelensky said the “ratio” of wounded and killed in the conflict was much higher for Russia because “their field medicine is weaker than ours, and they do not bring people who are wounded back,” suggesting it is Ukraine’s understanding that Russia leaves its wounded soldiers to die in the field.

For Ukraine, on the other hand, he said, “the exact numbers are very important for us: 45,100 people are dead, and we have around 390,000 cases of people wounded”.

Assuming the figures are close to correct in all cases, President Zelensky asserted Russia has suffered over seven-and-a-half-times more combat deaths than the Ukrainian army.

Thousands more were missing from both sides, Zelensky said, citing “around 50-70,000 MIA Russians” and “thousands” of missing Ukrainians, including an unknown number of soldiers being held prisoner by Moscow.

In addition, President Zelensky also raised the plight of over 19,500 children “forcefully brought to Russia from the temporarily occupied territories, but to be frank, we don’t know how many were killed.”

In all, President Zelensky said there were over one million Russians dead, wounded, or missing. The Ukrainian figure he gave was less than half, and he insisted the wounded figure involved fewer soldiers than it otherwise seemed because, in some cases, a single Ukrainian soldier is wounded several times but keeps returning to the front after treatment.

These figures seem to be beyond even the Ukrainian government’s official estimates of Russian combat casualties, including deaths and wounded, which in the latest point of publication claimed: “834,670 casualties in Ukraine between February 24, 2022, and January 29, 2025”.

President Trump, who in January had accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of “destroying” his country, said the figures he’d seen said “almost a million Russian soldiers have been killed. About 700,000 Ukrainian soldiers are killed. Russia’s bigger, they have more soldiers to lose. But that’s still no way to run a country.”