On Wednesday, the Kremlin rejected a claim from a U.S. think tank stating that Russian casualties in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine have reached 1.2 million, labeling the numbers as unreliable.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), based in Washington, indicated in a report that approximately 325,000 Russian soldiers had died between February 2022 and December 2025, along with another 875,000 wounded or unaccounted for.

The report noted that “no major power has endured casualty rates anywhere close to these figures in any conflict since World War II.”

Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for the Kremlin, dismissed the study, asserting that casualty statistics should only be considered credible if they originate from the Russian Ministry of Defense.

“I don’t believe such reports can be taken as trustworthy information,” Peskov stated during a daily press briefing.

Russia last revealed its military losses in September 2022, announcing that 5,937 soldiers had been killed since the onset of the full-scale invasion.

A verified count of Russian military fatalities, maintained by the exiled outlet Mediazona in collaboration with the BBC, reported 163,606 deaths as of mid-January. The CSIS report references this count in its estimates.

For Ukraine, the CSIS report estimates military fatalities to be between 100,000 and 140,000, with an additional 460,000 to 500,000 wounded or missing. This implies that Russian forces have experienced approximately two and a half casualties for every Ukrainian soldier lost or injured.

The United Nations has confirmed nearly 15,000 civilian fatalities in Ukraine since February 2022, while the estimated number of Russian civilian deaths is in the hundreds.