Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said Russia has sustained around 1.6 million casualties since its full-scale invasion began in February 2022, of which roughly 700,000 were deaths.
He put Ukraine’s own battlefield losses at about 50,000 soldiers killed, with a further 400,000 wounded and a large number listed as missing.
Zelensky gave the figures in an interview with the US broadcaster Fox News, published on July 31 after his visit to Washington.
He said he did not want to be “too candid” about Ukrainian losses because Moscow would otherwise draw conclusions about the state of his army.
That is lower than the number he gave in February. On February 5 he told the French broadcaster France 2 that 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed on the battlefield, with many more registered as missing.
Neither Kyiv nor Moscow publishes timely data on its own military losses and the figures cannot be independently verified. Russia’s defence ministry has not issued a battlefield death toll since September 2022.
Independent assessments are considerably higher. The Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that up to 140,000 Ukrainian troops and up to 325,000 Russian troops had been killed by the end of 2025.
In the same interview Zelensky argued that the Ukraine war and the conflict between the United States and Iran were connected, saying Russian-made components had been recovered from Iranian drones used against Israel and states in the Middle East.
He also repeated his claim that Moscow had passed Tehran satellite imagery of American bases in the region. In a post on July 25 he said Russian satellites had been tracking Gulf states and US military sites since the start of the month, adding that “these images subsequently appear in Iran”.
US President Donald Trump said on July 27 that he would raise the matter directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin, having previously said he did not believe Moscow was assisting Tehran.
The interview followed Zelensky’s White House talks on July 28, at which he pressed for anti-ballistic missiles and returned to the question of licences to build Patriot interceptors in Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials described the atmosphere as warm although no fresh commitments on deliveries were announced.
Zelensky also attended the funeral of US senator Lindsey Graham, who died on July 11, and spoke to senators before a procedural vote on a bipartisan Russia sanctions bill.
Graham had championed the measure for more than a year and agreed revised legislation with the White House shortly before his death.
