BrikoX
Global NewsBy the end of 2025, Russia’s total irrecoverable losses in the war are projected to reach 1.2 million—a figure unseen since World War II. Yet in the Kremlin, these unprecedented casualties are met with calm resolve. Russia appears willing to continue the war, losing hundreds of thousands of soldiers each year.
Archived version: https://archive.is/20251218190019/https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/russia-has-lost-12-million-troops-in-ukraine-more-than-its-entire-pre-war-army-14361
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Notes -
United 24 is Ukrainian state-affiliated media. Believe or do not believe this statistic if you want to.
Secondly, no, USSR was not necessarily any different from any country doing 'human wave' attacks.
The "human wave" was Hitler's invented excuse for the defeat of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad after having promised the German people for weeks that the city was sure to be captured "very soon". In truth, they were defeated by a Soviet pincer counter attack.
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1177/002200946900400312
Black Book-ass numbers from the "Kim Jong Un has died 456 times" crowd
I don't trust any casualty tallies I've seen for either side, really—including the 1.7 million for Ukraine that was claimed by those hackers. The real numbers are likely closely guarded. We'll have to wait for the historians to sort it out 10-20 years from now.
However, we do have clues as to which country (if any) is facing a recruitment crisis and/or demographic collapse: One side has resorted to stalking men on the streets and press-ganging them.
the widespread and rising desertion rates from Ukraine’s armed forces only seem to provoke more violent recruitment practices and then civilian protests.
Many include family members or friends fighting desperately to prevent their loved one being taken against his will.
It's beyond dispute; there exist many hundreds of videos documenting the practice. I'll never forget this mother trying to save her son, nor this man's scream.
Many Ukrainians are afraid to leave their homes. Several have died during their encounters with the "recruiters", some of them choosing to take their own lives with grenades rather than be taken to the front, and some succumbing to injuries sustained while trying to resist.
::: spoiler Ibid:
On October 23, Ukrainian Roman Sopin died from heavy blunt trauma to the head after he had been forcibly recruited
In August, a conscripted man, 36, died suddenly at a recruitment center in Rivne
In June, 45-year-old Ukrainian-Hungarian Jozsef Sebestyen died after he was beaten with iron bars following his forced conscription
In August, a conscript died from injuries sustained after he jumped out of a moving vehicle that was transporting him to the recruitment center :::
Ukrainians have begun to fight back by killing the recruiters.
The "winners" write the history books. It's unlikely we'll ever get true answers. Intelligence agencies are all over this waging their own information wars. Narratives spun, and spun again. We're entering an era where we will no longer even need crisis actors and groups to produce fake materials, where anyone can generate "evidence" typing a few lines into their favourite video generator.
When you ask outlets to show their methodology, you get ~100-150k, which is three orders of magnitude lower.
Just one, actually (10^6^→10^5^)
Im pretty sure the 1.2m number just measures casualties, not corpses.
If someone trips and breaks an ankle, that's a casualty just as much as when someone tries to headbutt an FPV drone.
Only one of those is unrecoverable though.
Hey, I’ve been hit by my own drone and I survived. It didn’t have a bomb though. 🙃
These totals include both those killed and severely wounded who will never return to combat—hence the classification as “irrecoverable losses.” Sources within Ukraine’s General Staff told UNITED24 Media that the proportion of killed Russian soldiers is rising each year. Early in the war, more troops were wounded than killed. That trend has now reversed.
From the article. It doesn't count sprained ankles but does count things like foot blown off.
Probably on average though, it includes injuries that can’t be recovered from like missing limbs.
Pretty sure Putin is just gonna keep going for it until he or every other Russian is dead.
I guess don't interrupt your enemy while they're making a mistake.
Losing 1.2 million troops...
That is a lot of dead Russians.
Surely, they must have lots to show for that level of sacrifice.
Don't forget all the latin americans, africans, middle easterners and asians. Over a hundred countries' nationals have fought on the russian side of the war. The reasons are all over the place.
The reasons are all over the place.
Deceit. Whatever reason or job opportunity they thought they were signing up for, was just the pretense for the Russians to press them into service.
It gets even worse than that man.
A whole lot of them were not Russians. Lots of foreign fighters and conscripts from taken territory.
I don’t think the Russians include those dead in official numbers.
If we stretch this thing out until the year 2509, we’ll get them down to zero.
More like 35 years until they have 0 military age males left if the current pace of losses continues. This also doesn't factor in people that fled the country after the conscriptions were announced.
14/0.4 = 35
According to the UN’s World Population Prospects report from 2019, there were a projected 14.25 million men aged 20-34 in Russia in 2020.
https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/russian-military-facing-looming-demography-crisis
Sadly^[I mean that earnestly. Having an entire generation hollowed out of a country is tragic in any context.], it's just ~1-2 years for Ukraine.
Both countries are in the same position demographically. Their pyramids looks almost identical.
Key difference is a factor of 4.
Do these graphs cite a source? I can't make any out, but maybe it's a text color thing.
The chart I shared is from the NYT, which is not known for a pro-Russian bias.
Data is from United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, visual pyramids are from populationpyramids.org.
Okay, I've had time to parse things a little.
Interestingly, the NYT chart and the pyramids website use the same data source! I didn't expect that because the charts look different to me, but maybe that's just because the NYT chart has more granularity.
It looks like you're right that the two countries share the same same demographic "shape". The culprit is Gorbachev and the catastrophic dissolution of the USSR which caused birthrates to plummet in all former Soviet states, so it makes sense that they would suffer similar fates.
It also looks like the war did, in fact, worsen the problem for Ukraine, which had a ~50% drop among fighting-aged men (which is coincidentally also the "nadir" cohort) from 2021 to 2023 😦. Somehow they gained some people in 2024. I don't understand how that's possible TBH—it's not like the war has got better in that time. Have there been a lot of repatriations? [Edit: Yes.]
::: spoiler NYT charts for 2021, 2023, and 2024
:::
We would need it to compare it to the changes in Russia's population over the same period to have the full picture. I'm going to go get dinner so maybe another comrade can help me out. I would expect a similar dynamic, but less pronounced due to the 4x population difference.
I only skimmed the report, but there is research on this.
- https://sites.utu.fi/utugeo/wp-content/uploads/sites/1223/2024/09/Return-migration-of-Ukrainians-from-the-EU-to-Ukraine.pdf
Also, it will probably spike again if US goes through their plan to deport Ukrainian refugees.
Thanks. We'll need to dig to figure out what's going on
I am optimistic that a forward-thinking Russia of the future won’t deny 6 year old girls or 90 year old women the egalitarian opportunity to “defend the motherland”.
More like 35 years until they have 0 military age males left
Nah, the thing with "military age" is that you can write down a new set of numbers.
