Kiev’s Western backers have nearly depleted their resources for waging the proxy war against Russia, the foreign minister says
Ukrainian military casualties in the conflict with Russia have exceeded 1 million and continue to rise, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.
Lavrov did not specify the types of losses; however, ‘military casualties’ refers to the total number of soldiers killed, wounded, missing in action, and taken prisoner.
Kiev does not release regular official tallies of its killed and wounded soldiers, and estimates vary widely. Earlier this year, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky told NBC News that since 2022, 43,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed and around 380,000 wounded. In a later interview, he said 100,000 were killed, but his office later denied the figure.
Kiev’s backers in the Western media have been skeptical of the numbers, with most analyses suggesting that total Ukrainian casualties are much higher.
“According to numerous independent estimates, the losses of the Ukrainian armed forces have long since exceeded one million people and continue to rise,” Lavrov said on Thursday during an embassy roundtable on resolving the Ukraine conflict.
He added that amid a general frontline collapse, Kiev’s Western backers are unlikely to keep propping up the regime much longer, as their “resources for waging a proxy war” against Russia “are being depleted.”
Last month, TASS cited Russian Defense Ministry data suggesting that Ukraine has been losing around 1,400 servicemen daily as killed or wounded, with total losses exceeding 468,000 in the first 11 months of 2025. President Vladimir Putin has said Russia’s losses are far lower, though Moscow also does not disclose exact casualty figures.
Russian troops have been making steady gains along the front line, as Ukrainian commanders complain that they are outgunned and outmanned, and struggle to replace battlefield losses despite a forced mobilization campaign launched last year. The campaign has sparked clashes between reluctant recruits and draft officers, including violent street detentions and reported abuses during conscription sweeps.
Desertions have also weighed heavily on Ukrainian forces. The latest publicly available figures show nearly 290,000 cases recorded since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, though critics say the real number of soldiers abandoning their units could be even higher.
