The casualties in the war in Ukraine are enormous on both sides, with a rate of loss exceeded only by a small fraction of the armed conflicts between states that have occurred in the last two centuries. But it is another thing to determine how enormous those casualties are. One year after the start of the invasion, some sources put the human losses on the Russian side on the way to 200,000 soldiers (between dead and wounded), and also very important figures, although smaller, on the Ukrainian side. Regarding civilians, some estimates speak of around 30,000 deaths.
However, the differences between the various calculations are very large and some analysts warn that, in a war that is also being fought on the ground of public opinion, the data on casualties are yet another propaganda weapon. They are part of the fog of war.
The data from the last few months show the disparities. Last November, US estimates put Russian soldiers dead and wounded at 100,000, a similar number to the Ukrainian defenders, while the European Union data was equally impressive if somewhat lower. But that was before the withdrawal from Kherson; In January, General Erik Kristofferssen, head of the Norwegian armed forces, raised the figure to 180,000 Russian casualties and kept the Ukrainian casualties at 100,000. And in early February The Wall Street Journal, citing US intelligence sources, put Russian losses at about 200,000 killed and wounded.
The casualties acknowledged by the Russian government are, however, much lower. The last balance made public by the Kremlin dates from last September, when it admitted a total of 5,937, a figure that, according to all analysts, falls very short. The figures from Mediazona, a group of independent Russian volunteers who collect data on deaths published in the media, obituaries or social networks – and, therefore, identified – speak of some 12,500 soldiers killed in mid-January. Due to the nature of these data, it is to be assumed that the real figures are clearly higher and the organization itself ventured that they would amount to almost double, some 22,000, to which would have to be added a much larger number of wounded.
Russia has been criticized for its opacity with respect to official data, but it cannot be said that the Ukrainian government has used a significantly different strategy, since while estimates of Russian losses arrive from that country almost daily, their own appear little by little. However, at the beginning of December, sources from the presidency placed their deaths at around 13,000. Logically, neither side is inclined to admit the real magnitude of the losses because that would be equivalent to acknowledging their own weaknesses and would have a negative impact on their respective public opinions.
The discrepancy between the estimates and the official figures is therefore very important and reality is probably somewhere between these two extremes. University of Birningham researcher Lily Hamourtziadou wrote earlier this month that “casualty reports are a potent propaganda tool” and suggested that the data being made public by Western allies tends to lessen Ukrainian casualties and amplify the russians
According to this point of view, magnifying the Kremlin’s losses would feed the discourse of the lack of preparation and improvisation of the Russian troops, arguments that, despite responding to reality, surely admit of nuances.
In any case, and regardless of the exact figures, analysts agree on two aspects. The first is that the levels of casualties in this war are well above those recorded in recent interstate armed conflicts, according to data accumulated by the Correlates of war project. Some researchers point out that the current armed clash is among the 10% of wars with the highest intensity of human losses if all those that have occurred since the beginning of the 19th century are analyzed, that is, only behind the two world wars and of large and long confrontations like the one in Vietnam. In this regard, Paul Poast, a professor of international relations at the University of Chicago, predicted at the time that the rate of human losses from the Russian-Ukrainian clash would be at the level of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871).
The other coincidence factor in all the estimates is that the losses for the Russian side are higher than those for the Ukrainian side. Paul Poast himself explained a few days ago to La Vanguardia that this is consistent with the Russian tradition. “In practice, his military doctrine has always been less risk-averse and casualty-averse than Western armies,” he says. In his opinion, Russia has traditionally followed the strategy of throwing huge amounts of men and material on its adversary to try to break it. “This hasn’t always worked, but it’s key to the way it has achieved some celebrated victories over the course of its history,” he concludes.
This is the case of the Second World War and the fight against Nazism, with which the Putin regime has insistently compared the current military campaign. The epic of sacrifice and memory of the Patriotic War is an argument that has been used repeatedly by the Kremlin. In this way, he tries to compensate for a possible internal social response that specialists had warned about a few months ago in the face of the high numbers of casualties. An instability that, on the other hand, does not seem to have occurred until now, at least in a massive way.
How far Russia can withstand a higher combat death and wounded rate than Ukraine is another matter, though keep in mind that demography is on Moscow’s side in this case. On the Ukrainian side, on the other hand, there is the fact that its troops are defending their own territory against Russian attacks that are not only causing military casualties, but thousands of civilian deaths.
The images of the bombardments of residential areas or the centers of large cities such as Kiyv, as well as the crimes perpetrated during the Russian occupation of places such as Bucha, suggest that the toll of civilian casualties from a year of war is very high. And indeed it is so.
Variations between sources are less than what happens with the military. While the Ukrainian government has shuffled figures of up to 40,000 victims, estimates from some Western sources have been corrected to 30,000. On the other hand, the Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights of the United Nations offers much smaller data, although in principle it incorporates only the confirmed ones, of 7,000 deaths and 11,300 wounded, from the beginning of the war until mid-January. Unfortunately, in a conflict of these characteristics, which, barring surprises, is expected to go on for a long time, these data seem to be just the beginning.
