Over the first eight months of 2025, Russia has lost 281,550 personnel—killed, wounded, or missing—according to Russian casualty statistics published by the “I Want to Live” project.
The breakdown is as follows: 86,744 killed, including 1,583 officers and 8,633 prisoners; 33,966 missing, including 11,427 prisoners; 158,529 wounded, including 6,356 officers and 16,489 prisoners; and 2,311 taken prisoner, the project’s Telegram channel reports.
Military equipment losses totaled 13,145 irrecoverable units, with another 48,458 theoretically repairable.
Average monthly losses amount to 35,193 personnel and 7,700 units of equipment, of which 1,643 are irrecoverable.
“On average, the Russian army loses one battalion per day in killed and missing—496 personnel. Each month, seven Russian Armed Forces brigades are lost in full. These figures can be compared to Soviet losses during the East Prussian offensive, when 126,000 soldiers were killed, but the Soviets captured northern Poland and all of Prussia, including Königsberg. Modern Russian generals have senselessly sacrificed 120,000 personnel yet cannot capture Pokrovsk even after several years,” the project notes.
The report highlights the extreme casualty ratios: due to the lack of an effective evacuation system for the wounded, there are only 1.3 wounded soldiers for every one killed, indicating low survival rates for those injured, who are poorly trained in tactical medicine and often left without aid.
The “Center” army group, composed of the 2nd and 51st combined-arms armies, suffered the heaviest losses. Under Ramil Ibatullin, the 2nd CA and its “meat-grinder” units—the 27th MSD and 30th OMSBr—lost 15,310 personnel irrecoverably and 16,260 wounded. The 51st CA, commanded by Serhiy Milchakov and including equally notorious “meat-grinder” units—the 1st, 5th, 114th, 132nd, 110th, and 9th motorized rifle brigades—lost 13,000 irrecoverably and 14,201 wounded, and suffered the highest equipment losses: 1,642 irrecoverable units.
Next, with slightly lower but still significant losses, is the 1st Tank Army in the “West” army group: 9,987 irrecoverable and 11,411 wounded. Elite Russian units, which the command tries to preserve, lost 2,272 paratroopers killed or missing and 3,191 wounded.
The report notes that it is unsurprising the Russian authorities avoid collecting bodies, concealing losses. The only time the Russian Ministry of Defense officially reported deaths was on March 25, 2022, and even then the numbers were heavily understated. Russian society should be morally prepared that, when the war ends, the true number of killed, missing, and wounded may be revealed, which since February 2022 has already far exceeded 1 million personnel and 50,000 units of equipment. The project concludes that this is the cost of Putin’s rule and the support it has received from the Russian population.
