Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a remarkable aside at the NATO summit this week when he claimed Ukraine had video evidence of “every single one” of the 30,000 Russian battlefield casualties they inflict a month.
Ukraine is “eliminating” 30,000 Russian soldiers a month and has evidence of every single kill, capture, and wounding, President Volodymyr Zelensky told a session of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation Defence Industry Forum at the Ankara, Turkey summit on Tuesday. The remarkable claim underlines the galloping pace of technological change where miniaturised digital cameras are now attached to practically every modern weapon — except, perhaps, the classic 155mm artillery — from action cameras on infantry helmets and rifles to the ubiquitous FPV drones, and the vast quantity of data coming out of battlefields today.
Zelensky’s headline Russian casualty claim conforms with recent analysis of the progress of the war in terms of casualties published by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which stated earlier this month that “Russia’s monthly casualty rates of over 30,000 per month in 2026Russia’s monthly casualty rates of over 30,000 per month in 2026”. This astonishing rate of soldiers being killed, maimed, or going missing in action on the battlefield has helped push the total estimated casualties in Russia’s invasion to around two million, split between approximately 1.4 million Russian and 600,000 Ukrainian.
Insisting these claims were no vain boast, but rather a sad reflection of the outcome of Russia’s war of choice, President Zelensky said on Tuesday:
… in Ukraine as we defend our positions on the frontline, and do so in a fully justified war of self-defence, we are now eliminating around 30,000 Russian soldiers every month… and we have video confirmation for every single one of them. The overwhelming majority were struck by drones.
And frankly we take no pride in this. We are saying it to show what modern war looks like, not a war we started, but one we are forced to fight.
The rate of losses for Russia, if realistic, may prove unsustainable for their military given they now outstrip Moscow’s ability to recruit new troops, albiet only slightly, with the CSIS report putting new sign-ups at 27,000 a month. Collaborating Ukraine’s claims on battlefield kills, the report stated: “According to some estimates, over 90 percent of Russian casualties are from drone attacks rather than a result of human-to-human engagements. Casualty rates are extremely high for soldiers that enter the kill zone.”
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