A Kremlin spokesman said Russian forces would continue fighting until Kiev made the “decisions” needed to end the war.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the number of Ukrainian soldiers killed on the battlefield as a result of the war with Russia was estimated at 55,000, adding that “many” were also missing.
President Zelensky’s comments on Wednesday came amid crucial ceasefire talks in Abu Dhabi as negotiators seek to end Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II, on the eve of the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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“Officially, in Ukraine, the number of soldiers who died on the battlefield, both experts and conscripts, is 55,000,” Zelensky said in a pre-recorded interview with France 2 television.
President Zelenskiy, whose comments were translated into French, added that in addition to the number of victims, there were “a large number of people” who were officially considered missing.
Ukraine’s leader still did not reveal the exact number of missing people.
President Zelensky previously cited Ukraine’s military death toll figures in an interview with NBC in February 2025, saying more than 46,000 Ukrainian military personnel had died on the battlefield.
In mid-2025, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., estimated that nearly 400,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed or wounded since the war began.
Last month, the United Nations Human Rights Observatory in Ukraine reported that Russian attacks in Ukraine killed 2,514 civilians and injured 12,142 in 2025, almost a third more than the number of casualties in 2024.
Russia has also suffered significant losses in the ongoing war.
In January, Ukrainian military commander Oleksandr Shirsky was quoted as saying that in 2025 alone, some 420,000 Russian soldiers would be killed or injured in fighting with Ukrainian forces.
British Defense Intelligence Agency estimates for October 2025 put the total number of Russian soldiers killed or injured in the war at 1.1 million.
Although both Ukraine and Russia actively report enemy losses on the battlefield, they rarely reveal their own casualty numbers in the war.
Analysts say both Kiev and Moscow are likely underreporting their own deaths and inflating those on the other side.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that Russia would continue fighting until Kiev makes a “decision” that would lead to an end to the war, while in Abu Dhabi, Ukrainian and Russian officials concluded a “productive” first day of new U.S.-brokered talks, Kiev’s chief negotiator Rustem Umerov said.
US President Donald Trump’s administration has called on Kiev and Moscow to find a compromise to end the fighting, but despite several rounds of talks, the two sides remain wide apart on key points.
The most sensitive issues are Moscow’s demands for Kiev to give up land it still controls, and the fate of Europe’s largest Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, currently in Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine.
As a condition of a deal to end the fighting, the Russian government requires Kiev to withdraw its troops from across the Donbas region, including the heavily fortified city, considered one of Ukraine’s strongest defenses against Russian aggression.
Ukraine said the conflict should be frozen along current fronts and rejected a unilateral withdrawal of troops from areas it still controls.
Russian forces occupy about 20% of Ukraine’s territory, including Crimea and parts of the eastern region of Donbas, which they captured before the 2022 invasion.
