KYIV, Ukraine — Fighting against Russia’s 4-year-old invasion has cost the lives of 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers, according to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as a U.S. envoy described two days of talks between Moscow and Kyiv officials as “detailed and productive.”
Ukraine has also listed “a large number of people” as missing in the war, Zelenskyy added in an interview broadcast by French TV channel France 2 late Wednesday.
The last time the Ukrainian leader gave a figure for battlefield deaths, in early 2025, he said 46,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed.
The two sides are locked in a grinding war of attrition along the roughly 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front line snaking along eastern and southern parts of Ukraine, where the Russian army is trying to make the bigger size of its army tell. Both sides are also firing long-range drones and missiles at targets in the rear.
Zelenskyy’s figure for troop deaths is much lower than an estimate given last month by a U.S. think tank. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that up to 140,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed through the end of last year.
Its report said Russia suffered up to 325,000 troop deaths over the same time.
Neither Moscow nor Kyiv gives timely data on military losses. The Russian Defense Ministry has not released figures on battlefield deaths since a statement in September 2022 that said just under 6,000 Russian soldiers had been killed.
Ukrainian civilians have also reeled from the fighting. Last year saw a 31% increase in Ukrainian civilian casualties compared with 2024, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch said in a report published Wednesday.
Almost 15,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed and just over 40,000 injured since the start of the war through last