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By Sean Rayment
Russia is losing more troops than the country’s armed forces can recruit for the first time since the Kremlin ordered the invasion of Ukraine.
The Russian army has been sustaining almost 40,000 casualties a month since November, while recruiting up to 35,000 troops to sustain the invasion, Western officials said.
Ukraine’s intense counter-attacks have pushed Russia’s casualties to more than 1.25 million since the war began four years ago. The figure is also higher than the total sustained by the United States during the Second World War.
Al Carns, the UK’s Armed Forces minister, said Russia’s effort to train fresh recruits was “becoming more and more difficult”, with financial incentives from the Kremlin failing to entice new soldiers to join the front line. “People are realising that it’s a one-way ticket,” he said.
Efforts to end the war have recently stalled despite US pressure to secure a deal.
Speaking ahead of today’s fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion, Volodymyr Zelensky said Putin was seeking to launch a third world war, telling the BBC: “I believe he has already started it.”
Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said Britain would continue to support Ukraine, insisting: “Russia is not winning this war.”
Russia has tried to persuade volunteers from poorer regions to join the war by promising $50,000 (£40,000) bonuses, but analysts question how long the economy can sustain the incentives.
The vast majority of Moscow’s losses, about 87 per cent, came from drone strikes, which now dominate the battlefield, with one drone as effective as 22 rounds of heavy artillery, Mr Carns said.
Russia’s losses have been exacerbated this month after Elon Musk banned the use of his Starlink satellite-based internet service.
Many of its drones can no longer fly and troops must communicate via radio, which is easier to intercept.
“The Russians’ intensity dropped when they were disconnected from Starlink,” a Ukrainian soldier told The Telegraph. “In two days, we regained Sosnivka [in Dnipropetrovsk] and are on the way to Huliapole [in Zaporizhzhia].”
Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK, warned artificial intelligence and drones had revolutionised the battlefield, leaving troops on both sides exposed.
“This has led to the creation of a robotic kill zone, which today extends at least 25 kilometres deep,” he said.
Around 325,000 Russian soldiers were killed in Ukraine between February 2022 and December 2025, with another 875,000 wounded or missing, bringing the invader’s total casualties to some 1.2 million, according to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
“These numbers are extraordinary,” the CSIS said. “No major power has suffered anywhere near these numbers of casualties or fatalities in any war since the Second World War.”
Ukraine has paid a grievous price to defend its territory, suffering 500,000 to 600,000 military casualties, including up to 140,000 deaths, according to the CSIS. These figures are contested. Zelensky said this month that Ukraine’s troop death toll stands at 55,000.
Some 15,000 Ukrainian civilians have also been killed, according to the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission.
America and its allies responded to the invasion by imposing punitive sanctions on Russia, targeting the country’s energy exports. European countries have cut their purchases of Russian gas, capped the price of its oil and frozen Kremlin assets held in their banks.
In total, these measures have deprived Putin of at least $450bn (£330bn) since February 2022, comprising $154bn (£114bn) in lost tax revenues and $285bn (£210bn) in frozen state assets, according to a published estimate from the Foreign Office.
Putin has covered the cost of his invasion by doubling Russia’s military budget since 2022 to exceed £200bn last year, almost half of all government spending and fully 10 per cent of GDP, according to figures disclosed by Germany’s external intelligence agency, the BND.
This investment has spurred the rapid expansion of Russia’s arms industry, allowing the economy to defy sanctions and avoid recession. But non-military sectors have been severely squeezed, and even the huge Keynesian injection of government spending caused Russia’s GDP to expand by only 1 per cent in 2025.
In Ukraine, the occupation of 20 per cent of the country, and constant drone and missile attacks on its cities and industries, have exacted a huge economic cost. Total GDP fell by nearly a quarter in 2022 alone, according to the World Bank. Since then, the economy has recovered, helped by higher defence spending and Ukraine’s success in reopening export routes across the Black Sea. But at around $190bn, Ukrainian GDP remains 5 per cent below its pre-invasion level.
Russian forces have virtually destroyed cities such as Mariupol while mounting almost daily strikes on Kyiv. So far, the total bill for repairing the damage and reconstructing Ukraine stands at $588bn (£435bn), according to the UN.