Russia’s army in Ukraine has suffered a sharp rise in men killed or missing in action, according to European and Ukrainian officials, reducing the chances of the battlefield breakthrough President Vladimir Putin seeks.
The recent jump in losses will make it harder for Russian forces to sustain gruelling offensive operations, which in some areas have ground to a pace slower than the Battle of the Somme, analysts say.
Not enough Russians are being induced to fight in Ukraine by the enormous payouts on offer, forcing Moscow’s army to recruit a higher share of accused criminals, pressure conscripts into signing contracts once their mandatory service ends and redeploy wounded soldiers.
Desertion rates are at their highest point in the nearly four-year war, according to Ukrainian analytical group Frontelligence Insight.
“Putin’s bet has been that sustained pressure across a broad front is going to eventually lead to a collapse on the Ukrainian side. But the way Russian forces are fighting simply won’t generate operationally significant breakthroughs,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Recruitment trends, meanwhile, “increasingly tell us that Russia will struggle to sustain offensive pressure”, Kofman added.
Ukraine’s own manpower shortages have forced it to surrender territory along some parts of the frontline to push back Russian forces elsewhere. Russia’s population is also several times larger than Ukraine’s, giving it a far greater pool of recruits to draw from.
Though Russia is meeting its enlistment targets of about 35,000 per month, as many as 90 per cent of new recruits in 2025 were deployed to replace battlefield casualties, according to Oleksandr Syrsky, commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces.
Russia claimed to have recruited 422,704 men last year and has set similar targets for 2026.
In December, Putin claimed at a meeting with Russian commanders that the goal of capturing four partially occupied Ukrainian regions was “going according to plan”.
His armed forces, however, are delivering the progress Putin demands at a slower pace and higher cost than at any point in the war.
Those advances have come at a rate of just 15 to 70 metres per day in Russia’s most prominent offensives since it gained the upper hand on the battlefield in 2024 — slower than in almost any war in the last 100 years, according to a January report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
At least 325,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the conflict, according to the CSIS report, five times greater than in all Russian and Soviet wars combined since the second world war and at a ratio of at least twice Ukraine’s battlefield casualties.
Those numbers have risen further in recent months. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, claimed last week that 30,000 to 35,000 Russian soldiers are killed or seriously wounded each month.
Western officials quote similar figures for Russia’s total attrition rate, which also includes those less seriously wounded in action. Ukrainian officials and analysts say that Russia is taking a greater share of unrecoverable casualties.
Zelenskyy said the frontline losses would eventually create more difficulties for Russia to sustain its recruitment numbers. “If this continues, they would lose 100,000—120,000 of their frontline troops in just a few months. And they won’t be able to fill that gap easily,” he said.
The intense drone warfare that has come to characterise the fighting in the last year has made it more difficult for Russian forces to gain ground without taking unnecessary casualties.
Drones are currently responsible for 70 to 80 per cent of killed and wounded on both sides, according to a report by Latvia’s foreign intelligence service last month.
Russian commanders are pushing their forces to make incremental advances for higher costs, according to a former Ukrainian officer who runs Frontelligence Insight.
“They push their resources beyond reasonable limits, leading to casualties that are often avoidable,” he said.
In modern battlefield conditions, a far greater number of those casualties are unrecoverable.
“A wounded soldier can quickly become a liability when dozens of drones are hovering over an area, either observing or actively targeting, while evacuation options remain extremely risky,” the former officer added.
Instead of conducting mechanised assaults, Russia’s forces have fought using dismounted infantry, light motorised attacks and infiltration tactics to penetrate past Ukrainian positions.
“Essentially, they are trading previous losses in equipment for much higher losses in personnel,” Kofman said. “And since Russia long ago established assault troops and a contracting pipeline to funnel new personnel towards the front, they largely didn’t care about expending these people,” he added.
Russians who do sign up for the front are enticed to do so through a system of lavish bonuses largely funded through regional budgets.
The payouts, which can amount to the equivalent of several years’ average wages, dipped last year before spiking again in recent weeks, which analysts say indicates governors’ scramble to fulfil recruitment targets.
In Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia’s largest oil-producing region, the total package for recruits stands at Rbs4.1mn ($53,000); 28 others offer bonuses that, combined with other payments, amount to Rbs2.5mn.
“As long as they still have the money to offer contracts, people will come,” a senior European military official said. “Propaganda probably has a limited effect on motivation. If anything, the main thing is to keep the reality of the situation suppressed.’’
As Russia’s wartime economy cools, however, the expenditure is putting growing strain on regional budgets, which could come under pressure to reduce the payouts as the economic slowdown hits.
To save money, Russia has restricted payments to the families of those missing in action, and redeployed more injured soldiers, a senior European official said.
Regions spent at least Rbs500bn on enlistment bonuses last year, according to Janis Kluge, a Russia expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
Russia can still continue to meet its recruitment targets at the current rate if it continues to prioritise military spending above all else, Kluge said.
All signing-on bonuses alone, which are drawn variously from federal, regional, municipal, and some corporate budgets, account for about 0.5 per cent of Russian GDP, Kluge said.
‘‘That’s huge just for the purpose of recruiting people for the army, but in the context of military spending that is between 8 and 10 per cent of GDP, it’s just a small part of the cost of this war,” he said. “They could double that, and they would certainly find more men.”
The payouts are most attractive in Russia’s poorest regions, which have supplied a disproportionate number of soldiers, often from their large indigenous populations.
A report last month by the Bell, an independent Russian news site, found that men from regions like Buryatia and Tuva in Siberia were 25 times more likely to die fighting in Ukraine than men from Moscow. Many of them signed up to fight for other, richer regions that offered larger payouts.
“We already see a lot of regions going into the red. But on the other hand, with more poverty it would be cheaper to sign people up,” said Alexander Kolyandr, a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis who compiled the report for the Bell.
Kofman said Russia couldn’t carry on like this indefinitely. Eventually, “you run out of individuals for whom the money is worth it,” he said.
“Russia is short on skilled labour, it doesn’t have an unlimited number of men who are willing to go and fight.”
Additional reporting by Sam Jones in Berlin, Christopher Miller in Kyiv, Henry Foy in Brussels, Charles Clover and Chris Cook in London, and Amy Mackinnon in Washington
Cartography by Cleve Jones and data visualisation by Chris Cook and Alan Smith in London