What Zelenskyy said about war casualties on 9 December 2024
A retrospective on the casualty figures the Ukrainian president gave for both armies, reported on 8 December 2024 and covered here as of 9 December 2024.
What did Ukraine's president say about the human cost of the war as of 9 December 2024? The previous day, 8 December 2024, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave figures for losses on both sides of the Russian invasion that began in 2022.
According to those figures, 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in action and 370,000 had been injured. He put Russian casualties at 198,000 soldiers killed and more than 550,000 injured.
The numbers were his own estimates, as reported at the time, and they covered the period from the start of the full-scale invasion.
The wider picture, later
Accounts compiled later place the overall toll in a far broader range. They estimate between 1,274,000 and 2 million casualties during the Russian invasion from 24 February 2022 to June 2026. That estimate postdates 9 December 2024 and was not available on the day.
The same later account records six deaths during the 2014 annexation of Crimea and 14,200–14,400 military and civilian deaths during the war in Donbas.
