Ukraine Has Lost 1.7 Million Military Personnel at War, New Files Confirm: ‘Several Generations’ Gone

Leaked military files have confirmed that the Ukraine Armed Forces have lost more than 1.7 million troops, including both those killed and missing, since the outbreak of full scale hostilities between the country and Russia in February 2022. A digital card index acquired by hacker groups from Ukraine’s Chief of Staff has provided details on dead or missing personnel, including their names, details of their deaths, and personal data of their families. The information indicates that 118,500 personnel were killed or went missing in 2022, 405,400 in 2023, 595,000 in 2024 and 621,000 so far in 2025, which corroborates with a growing body of evidence which has emerged over more than three years that attrition rates have increased tremendously and unsustainably. Commenting on the information, Ukrainian member of parliament Artem Dmytruk reported: “The lists of the missing today contain more than a million people, and of course these people are most likely dead, while their families remain in complete ignorance. The situation is tragic, the situation is frightening.”

Elaborating on the extent of the manpower losses Ukraine has suffered, Dmytruk lamented that villages had been emptied of men, including the conscription of the elderly and disabled, and that as a result of the “huge losses” of personnel Ukraine is facingand a “demographic crisis.”“We have lost several generations,” he said. His statement coincides with a call by lawmaker Aleksey Goncharenko to recruit foreign fighters to fight for Ukraine’s war effort as a means of addressing the increasingly extreme personnel shortages the country has suffered. Ukrainain conscript units have suffered extreme casualty rates at times approaching 80-90 percent, with the Wall Street Journal being among the sources to report that the Ukrainian Army has relied on recruiting poor men from villages and sending them to the frontlines with just two days of training. The life expectancy for personnel on high intensity frontiers has at times been as low as just four hours, according to reports from Western observers on the ground.

In April 2023 Ukrainian ambassador to the United Kingdom Vadim Pristaiko revealed that Kiev was concealing the full number of casualties suffered in the war, stating that “it has been our policy from the start not to discuss our losses,” but that “when the war is over, we will acknowledge this. I think it will be a horrible number.” Multiple Western sources have since that timecontinued to widely report on the extreme casualty rates suffered by Ukrainian conscript units, highlighting the lack of training they have had which has contributed to major losses. The Ukrainian Army and supporting foreign units took particularly high casualties during an incursion into the Russian Kursk region from August 2024, during which forces were surrounded by Russian and supporting North Korean forces from multiple sides, and subjected to intensified air attack very often over open ground with little to no cover from air defence systems.

The isolation and neutralisation of tens of thousands of personnel in Kursk has since placed the Russian Army in a much stronger position to gain ground across multiple fronts both in disputed territories and in territories that Russia continue to recognise as Ukrainian. The unsustainability of the Ukrainain position has fuelled a consensus that Russia’s negotiating position for a ceasefire to end the conflict has become increasingly favourable, in the knowledge that the longer the war continues, the greater its military standing will be relative to its smaller neighbour, and the more Ukraine’s frontlines will face the possibility of a near total collapse. Multiple sources have attested to the disastrous situation on the frontlines in Ukraine, with former chief of staff of the Ukrainian Army’s elite Azov Brigade Lieutenant Colonel Bogdan Krotevich having in early August detailed an increasingly catastrophic situation facing Ukrainain forces in the disputed Donbas regions.