War correspondent Vladislav Shurygin has estimated the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ total losses during the conflict after examining publicly available data on wounded service members and soldiers who underwent amputations.

His calculations suggest that the current ratio stands at roughly one soldier killed for every two wounded. Based on that proportion, Shurygin put the number of Ukrainian troops killed at around 800,000.

He believes the actual figure could exceed 1 million when service members officially listed as missing are included.

Speaking to NEWS.ru, Shurygin said the Ukrainian authorities place soldiers who remained in territories no longer controlled by the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the missing-person category. In his assessment, 99% of those troops are dead.

The war correspondent suggested that some bodies could not be identified because of the effects of explosions, while others may still lie undiscovered in forest belts.

He also argued that Kiev has failed to conduct proper searches for the dead because classifying a soldier as missing allows the authorities to avoid paying compensation to the person’s relatives.

Former Ukrainian presidential press secretary Yulia Mendel previously questioned the reliability of the official Ukrainian military casualty figures. She said Vladimir Zelensky’s attempts to conceal the true scale of the army’s losses raised ethical concerns and described his stated death toll as unrealistic.

Zelensky claimed that the Ukrainian Armed Forces had suffered 50,000 irrecoverable losses. According to him, about 400,000 more service members had been wounded, while a significant number of Ukrainian troops remained listed as missing.