Ukrainian forces have killed or wounded as many as 35,000 Russian troops every month since the start of the year, Finland’s president has claimed.
Alexander Stubb told the Clash Report this equates to a “ratio of one Ukrainian dead to five Russians dead” over the past four months. He said that 95% of Russian casualties were caused by drones.
The EU finally approved a €90 billion loan to Ukraine last week after outgoing Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán ended his months-long veto. The funding, first agreed last December, is a “matter of life and death” for Kyiv, said Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Taras Kachka. “Two-thirds of it will be spent on bolstering Ukraine’s defence needs while the rest will go on broader financial assistance,” said the BBC.
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Outside Russia, the invasion on 24 February 2022 “was widely seen as an attempt to force Kyiv back into Moscow’s orbit and to overturn the entire post-Cold War security architecture in Europe”, said the BBC’s Russia editor Steve Rosenberg. “The Russian leadership envisaged a short and successful military operation. It didn’t go to plan.”
As the war “grinds on”, each side has claimed small victories but the overall picture has barely changed.
Can Ukraine win the war?
With fighting now in its fifth year, and no sign of a peace agreement, the war is increasingly likely to be decided by two key factors: the supply of soldiers and maintaining international support.
Ukraine’s “inherent weakness is that it depends on others for funding and arms”, said the BBC’s international editor, Jeremy Bowen. On the other hand, Russia “makes most of its own weapons” and is “buying drones from Iran and ammunition from North Korea” with no limitations on how they are used. It also enjoys an advantage in raw manpower, bolstered by massive conscription drives.
Vladimir Putin aims to have a bigger army than America’s, with 1.5 million active servicemen, “a sign of Russia’s relentless militarisation”, said Sky News’ Moscow correspondent Ivor Bennett. Its superiority in personnel and materials – along with the use of new “infiltration tactics”, reported by Deutsche Welle – has seen it take the initiative on the battlefield since 2024.
Yet the suggestion by Putin and senior Russian government and military figures that Ukraine’s front line faces “imminent collapse” is a “false narrative”, said the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War. Such claims are likely to be “an effort to coerce the West and Ukraine into capitulating to Russian demands that Russia cannot secure itself militarily”.
Ukraine’s case will be further bolstered by the multibillion-euro loan from the EU that will allow it to replenish its air defences and rapidly depleting stockpile of weapons, equipment and ammunition. The money, which Ukraine would only need to repay if Russia were to agree to reparations, was “a sign that Russia cannot outlast Ukraine”, the EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said last week.
What does victory look like for each side?
Before Russia launched its invasion, Putin outlined the objectives of what he called a “special military operation”. His goal, he claimed, was to “denazify” and “demilitarise” Ukraine, and to defend Donetsk and Luhansk, the two eastern Ukrainian territories occupied by Russian proxy forces since 2014.
Another objective, although never explicitly stated, was to topple the Ukrainian government and remove President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “The enemy has designated me as target number one; my family is target number two,” said Zelenskyy shortly after the invasion. Russian troops made two attempts to storm the presidential compound.
Russia shifted its objectives, however, about a month into the invasion, after Russian forces were forced to retreat from Kyiv and Chernihiv. According to the Kremlin, its main goal became the “liberation of the Donbas”, including the regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
Just last month The Bell, an independent Russian news site, reported that Putin had gathered key oligarchs and asked them to contribute financially to the war.
“We will keep fighting,” a source told The Bell, summarising Putin’s remarks. “We will push to the borders of Donbas,” said another source.
The Trump administration has centred peace talks “around a core bargain”, said Samuel Charap and Jennifer Kavanagh in Foreign Affairs – that Ukraine cedes the roughly 20% of the Donbas region it still holds to Russia “in exchange for security commitments from the US and Europe”.
While Kyiv has raised the potential option of establishing a demilitarised “free economic zone” in eastern Donbas, it would never agree to hand over control of territory its soldiers have fought and died to defend.
With oil revenues rising due to the war in the Middle East, there is also little incentive for Putin to play ball. The Russian president would gladly have taken as a win a “Kremlin-friendly peace plan that enshrines Ukraine’s perpetual subordination”, said The New York Times. But he’ll also see “a failed process” as a victory if it leads Donald Trump to “pull remaining support for Ukraine”. With his economy struggling and his troops mired in a slow advance that’s had a steep cost in “lives and matériel”, Putin’s capacity for continued war “isn’t limitless”. But he believes “time is on his side” and his goal hasn’t shifted: he “wants to break Ukraine”.
How many Russian and Ukrainian troops have died in the conflict?
True casualty figures are “notoriously difficult to pin down”, said Newsweek, and “experts caution that both sides likely inflate the other’s reported losses”.
Russian authorities do not release official casualty figures but the “huge battlefield losses” are clear for all to see, said Rosenberg. “So many of the towns and villages I’ve visited in the last two years have had museums and monuments dedicated to soldiers killed in Ukraine, as well as separate sections for recent war dead at local cemeteries.”
Last summer, Russia’s wartime toll reached a “historic milestone”, said The Guardian, with more than a million troops killed or injured since the start of the invasion, according to the UK Ministry of Defence. Russia Matters cited MoD estimates for October 2025 that put the number of Russian soldiers killed or wounded at 1,118,000.
As of the start of this year, Russian forces had suffered “nearly 1.2 million casualties”, which would mark “more losses than any major power in any war since World War II”, said the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) think tank.
Ukrainian casualty tolls – including deaths, injuries, and soldiers classified as missing – are believed to be around 500,000 to 600,000, said Brad Lendon of CNN.
It means that “at current rates, combined Russian and Ukrainian casualties could reach 2 million by the spring of 2026”, said CSIS.
