Russia likely lost 1,500 troops a day for the last 3 months, straining its ability to replace them

A Russian military recruitment ad in Moscow.

ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images

Russia’s dead and wounded have averaged over 1,500 a day in recent months, according to Ukraine.Russia’s recruitment rate will likely struggle to replace those lost, military analysts said.The Kremlin is trying to avoid a politically unpopular military mobilization to support its war.

Russian battlefield casualties — dead and injured — have risen to more than 1,500 a day over the last three months, posing serious problems when it comes to replacing their numbers, military analysts said.

UK Ministry of Defence reports suggest that Russia lost an average of 1,523 soldiers a day in November, 1,570 in December, and 1,556 in January, citing figures from Ukraine’s General Staff. (Russia doesn’t regularly release its own casualty figures.)

It’s a significant jump that matches the pace and intensity of Russian assaults along the front line in Ukraine and in Ukrainian-occupied Kursk throughout 2024.

In January 2024, Russia was losing far fewer troops — an average of 846 a day, according to the UK MOD.

But it was attracting between 1,000-1,100 new recruits a day, according to an estimate from Vadym Skibitskyi, deputy chief major general of Ukraine’s main military intelligence arm, more than enough to replace those lost.

Some estimates of Russia’s current military recruitment, alongside soaring casualty figures, suggest that this may no longer be the case.

“The Russian military may be struggling to recruit enough new military personnel,” analysts at the Institute for the Study of War said in an assessment this week.

They added that they had observed reports in recent months that parts of Russia were failing to meet their monthly recruitment quotas, with people less willing to sign up to fight.

Russia announced a large military recruitment drive last year, but calling up reservists is both politically unpopular and removes workers from its already stretched labor force.

The Kremlin has tried to tempt recruits by more than doubling its one-time signup payout to about $4,640 per soldier.

And on February 3, Russia’s defense ministry proposed reclassifying illnesses like syphilis and schizophrenia as less serious medical conditions, loosening restrictions on military service, Russian state-run news agency TASS reported.

Estimates of current Russian recruitment rates vary.

In December, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that 430,000 recruits — or an average of 35,833 a month — signed up in 2024.

But Pavel Luzin, a defense expert for the Center for European Policy Analysis, wrote in January that Putin “appears to have been exaggerating again.”

Luzin’s own analysis of Russian budget figures gave a “probable assessment” of no more than 60-70,000 new troops in the last quarter of the year, or 23,300 new troops a month at most.

That’s less than an estimate by one NATO official, who said that Russia was likely recruiting around 25-30,000 a month over that period.

Ukraine has also struggled to recruit additional troops, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy so far resisting US calls to lower the military draft age from 25 to 18.

Russia’s recent losses are a marker of the pace and ferocity of its assaults along the front line in Ukraine. The UK MOD said that 48,240 Russian troops were killed or wounded in January alone.