The human cost of the war in Ukraine, two years after the Russian invasion, is in the hundreds of thousands but the exact toll is unknown, with both sides shrouding their losses in secrecy, and Russia covering up civilian deaths in areas it has conquered.
Official tolls of civilians killed since the beginning of the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, are unreliable as no independent count has been made because of a lack of access to Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia.
In June 2023, Ukrainian authorities said they had only been able to record 10,368 civilians whose bodies had been found.
“What we think most probable is that the number is five time higher. Around 50,000 casualties,” said Oleg Gavrych, a top aide to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff.
The UN’s human rights office has also acknowledged that the number is considerably higher than the roughly 10,000 civilians it had confirmed dead.
Ukrainian authorities believe the siege of the southern port of Marioupol from February to May 2022 alone left at least 25,000 dead, many buried in mass graves. The port remains under Russian control.
And there has never been a toll established for other towns that were nearly razed to the ground, like Bakhmut.
Across the Russian border, at least 145 civilians have been killed, according to the Russian news site 7×7.
Both Ukraine and Russia keep their military losses under wraps while regularly claiming, without providing proof, to have inflicted heavy losses on each other.
The BBC Russian Service and news outlet Mediazona said on February 21 that they had confirmed the identity of around 45,000 Russian soldiers who died in Ukraine since the invasion began.
It included only the names of soldiers publicly identified in open-source data — mainly obituaries — and warned that the real toll could be twice as high.
In August 2023, The New York Times quoted US officials as putting Ukraine’s military losses at 70,000 dead and 100,000 to 120,000 injured.
On the Russian side, the US officials estimated 120,000 dead and 170,000 to 180,000 injured.
On January 29, in a written response to a parliamentary question, UK Armed Forces Minister James Heappey put the Russian losses at more than 350,000 dead and injured.
The Ukrainian army estimated on February 20 that it had killed or wounded more than 405,000 Russian troops since the invasion.
In December 2023, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said that his troops had killed or injured 383,000 Ukrainian soldiers.
