More than 46,000 Ukrainian troops killed defending against Russian invasion, says Zelensky

US officials have estimated the Ukrainian troop death toll is closer to around 60,000 to 70,000

More than 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed defending against Russia’s full-scale invasion which began in February 2022, president Volodymyr Zelensky said.

Mr Zelensky also revealed that “tens of thousands” of Ukrainian troops were missing in action or being held in Russian captivity, as the grinding war of attrition nears its three-year anniversary.

The figures released by the Ukrainian president differ from the estimates of Kyiv’s allies. Last year, The Economist reported anonymous US officials as estimating that at least 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died and up to 120,000 wounded. In October, another US official estimated to the New York Times that more than 57,500 had been killed and 250,000 wounded.

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Troops in the 24th Mechanized brigade prepare a rocket-launch system as Ukraine defends the front in the eastern Donetsk region (via REUTERS)

Speaking to NBC, Mr Zelensky said: "We have 46,000-plus killed soldiers. Then we have... it's difficult to say, tens of thousands more who are missing in action or are in captivity - and you cannot know for certain because missing in action can be dead. “I think there are something like 380,000 wounded, [and] there are 20,000 children deported to Russia."

Ukraine was reluctant to share casualty numbers earlier on in the war for fear of demoralising the war-torn country. But in December, Mr Zelensky revealed 43,000 had been killed, rising to 45,000 by February 4.

Casualty numbers among both Russian and Ukrainian troops have been strongly disputed by both countries, along with war monitors and open-source data. Ukraine’s General Staff estimates that Russia has suffered 859,920 casualties. Russia has not provided an update to its death toll since it claimed 6,000 soldiers had been killed in September 2022, The Times reported.

In January this year, US president Donald Trump put out an unsubstantiated figure of 700,000 Ukrainian troop deaths on top of one million Russian troop deaths. This is far higher than any estimates by either warring country or their allies.

President Zelensky said 20,000 Ukrainian children had been deported to Russia (AFP via Getty Images)

Gauging the real casualty and death toll in the war is near-impossible amid the fog of war, with warring parties often pushing out lowball figures to mitigate damage to their troops’ morale.

Mr Zelensky revealed the figure in a critical period for Ukraine, as Mr Trump pushes for talks to secure a peace deal with the Putin regime.

Top US diplomats flew out to Saudi Arabia on Sunday in the first high-level and in-person discussions between Russian and US officials in years. It precedes a proposed meeting between Mr Trump and Putin, which the US president said could happen “very soon”. Ukraine was not invited to the talks, Mr Zelensky said on Saturday.

Kyiv is reluctant to be forced into a peace deal that will see it give up large amounts of land. On Monday morning, Ukrainian forces said they had recaptured a village on the key eastern front of Pokrovsk - where Russia has been slowly advancing for months.