Hundreds of thousands wounded and dead in Ukraine as war grinds on, intelligence suggests

With no end in sight after more than 21 months of war, the number of people killed or wounded in the Russian invasion of Ukraine is in the hundreds of thousands, intelligence estimates suggest.

The U.K. Ministry of Defence said this week that between late February 2022, when the move to take Kyiv began, and this November, official Russian forces suffered as many 240,000 wounded and 50,000 killed. Wagner Group mercenaries likely suffered 40,000 wounded and 20,000 killed, the ministry said.

"The median of the estimate range is 320,000 total Russian combatant casualties," the ministry tweeted. "Even amongst Russian officials there is likely a low level of understanding about total casualty figures because of a long-established culture of dishonest reporting within the military."

Fighting continues to rage in the biggest European conflict since the Second World War, with no sign that either side has landed a telling blow on the battlefield.

Ukrainian soldiers, many living in freezing trenches, acknowledge they are exhausted going into a second winter of full-scale war with a resource-rich, nuclear-armed superpower that has more than triple Ukraine's population.

A Ukrainian civic group said it has confirmed 24,500 combat and non-combat deaths using open sources. But if many of the 15,000 troops listed as missing are also dead, the figure could be much higher, according to a report published in the Ukrainian journal Tyzhden.

"Obviously, the 24,500 names are not the final number of dead (deceased), but by our assessment it is no less than 70 per cent," the authors wrote. "That is, the real number of dead (deceased) in combat and non-combat situations is more than 30,000 people."

Reuters could not independently verify the figures.

Kyiv treats its losses as a state secret and officials say disclosing the figure could harm its war effort.

An August report by the New York Times, citing anonymous U.S. officials, put the Ukrainian death toll at close to 70,000 and the number of wounded as high as 120,000.

The UN said last month that more than 10,000 civilians had been killed.

Whatever the number, Ukrainian casualties have been dwarfed by Russia's.

"Russian forces may be suffering losses along the entire front in Ukraine at a rate close to the rate at which Russia is currently generating new forces," the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think-tank, wrote this week.

It pointed to attrition-heavy battles in the eastern cities of Bakhmut, Maryinka and Avdiivka.