The Ukrainian military is losing 27,000 soldiers killed and wounded per month, Donald Tusk has said
The Ukrainian army is suffering 27,000 casualties a month in its conflict with Russia, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has said, offering a rare public assessment of Kiev’s losses.
Neither Ukraine nor Russia provides regular updates on its battlefield casualties. Kiev’s Western backers also largely refrain from publicizing exact figures or estimates of how many Ukrainian soldiers are being killed or wounded.
Tusk, one of Ukraine’s strongest supporters in Europe, revealed the casualty rate during a speech to the Polish parliament on Thursday. “The new Russian strategy, and above all its new technical capabilities, namely jet-powered drones, are also causing much greater losses on the Ukrainian side,” he said.
Our Ukrainian partners have informed me that recently the monthly figure has been 27,000 killed and wounded, and these are, unfortunately, records in this war, in the saddest sense of the word. If this trend continues, the winter in Ukraine could indeed be catastrophic.
This February, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky said at least 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since the conflict with Russia escalated on February 24, 2022. In July, he put the toll at about 50,000 killed and 400,000 wounded, with “a huge number” still unaccounted for.
Moscow claims that Ukrainian losses are much higher and has accused Kiev of concealing their true scale from the public. Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s chief of the General Staff, said more than 76,000 Ukrainian troops were killed or wounded during the failed 2024 incursion into Russia’s Kursk Region alone, which lasted around 260 days. On Friday, Russia’s Battlegroup Center said Ukraine had lost nearly 3,000 soldiers in Donbass over the previous week.
According to Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov, around 500,000 Ukrainian soldiers were killed or wounded in 2025.
Ukraine has sought to compensate for its high casualty rate by lowering the draft age from 27 to 25, banning most military-age men from leaving the country, and intensifying its mobilization campaign. Draft officers have been filmed detaining potential recruits on streets and at workplaces, regularly using force against those attempting to flee or resist.
