1,418 days later Russia’s full-scale invasion has outlasted the Soviet Union’s fight against Nazi Germany. But by many measures, only Ukraine is paying a comparable price.
As of January 11, Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine has lasted longer than the Soviet Union’s fight against Nazi Germany. Though the two wars are fundamentally different, the duration of Moscow’s invasion has inevitably drawn comparisons to the fighting on World War II’s Eastern Front, known in Russia as the “Great Patriotic War.” Opponents of the war in Ukraine — and even some pro-war commentators critical of Russia’s military brass — often note that in the space of four years, the Red Army overcame its initial retreat and then advanced all the way to Berlin. By contrast, Russian forces in Ukraine today have spent years fighting over the same small towns and villages in the country’s east.
That said, such comparisons are obviously flawed. World War II was a clash of great powers, in which parties to the conflict mobilized their economies and societies on a massive scale. Millions of soldiers fought at the front, and in some theaters, the intensity of combat exceeded anything seen in 21st century warfare so far. Meduza’s analysis suggests that the Russia–Ukraine war is existential in this sense only for Ukraine. While a combination of all-out mobilization and extensive support from Western partners has allowed Kyiv to sustain its defense, the Kremlin has proven unable or unwilling to mount a similarly all-encompassing effort — despite framing the war as an existential struggle against the West. Here’s how we reached this conclusion.
First, some caveats
It’s important to note that there’s a lot about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that we don’t know, or that we have only limited information about. World War II, on the other hand, has been studied extensively for 85 years, and far more data has been gathered about it, even if that data is often incomplete and frequently disputed.
The scarcest and least reliable data in the current war concerns the state of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, largely as a result of wartime censorship. We don’t know the exact size of Ukraine’s fighting force, its true casualty figures, or the real scale of mobilization in the country. The only available assessments suggest that, by some of these measures, Ukraine’s Armed Forces may not be dramatically smaller than Russia’s. As for the Russian military, we have far more dependable information — largely because many people in Russia who oppose the war, including journalists, researchers, and independent analysts, have actively worked to overcome military censorship.
It’s also important to note that our analysis frequently draws direct comparisons between the Russian Armed Forces and the Red Army during World War II. From a political standpoint, this is problematic: we’re juxtaposing data on the military of the aggressor in the current war with data on forces assembled from across the Soviet Union’s constituent republics to repel an invasion. Yet this comparison is precisely what allows us to grasp the scale and intensity of the fighting. It’s also the comparison for which we have the most relatively reliable data: official reports on the size of the active-duty Soviet army and its losses (however contested they may be), alongside our own calculations and other journalists’ calculations on the condition of the Russian Armed Forces in their confrontation with Ukraine’s military.
When did Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine outlast the Great Patriotic War?
The most commonly cited length of the war between the USSR and Nazi Germany is 1,418 days. Whether this figure is actually correct is debatable, since fighting continued in various parts of the world for quite some time even after Germany’s Instrument of Surrender had formally entered into force.
It’s possible to apply stricter, more formal criteria and define the war’s duration as the period between the delivery of Germany’s note announcing the start of hostilities to Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov in 1941 and the moment the Act of Unconditional Surrender took effect in 1945. According to Molotov’s later recollections, the former took place on June 22 between 2:30 and 3:00 a.m. Moscow time, while the latter occurred at 1:01 a.m. on May 9, Moscow time. The length between these two events is 1,416 days and 22 hours. This means the usual figure of 1,418 days is slightly overstated.
A similar calculation can be applied to Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, starting from Vladimir Putin’s televised address announcing the launch of the “special military operation.” That broadcast began on February 24, 2022, at 5:30 a.m. Moscow time. By this measure, the duration of the ongoing war officially exceeded that of the Great Patriotic War on January 11, 2026, at around 4:00 a.m.
Comparing the death tolls
The war between the USSR and Nazi Germany claimed tens of millions of lives. In Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, casualties on both sides combined are likely well under one million at this point. This difference reflects the scale of the forces involved. According to official figures, more than 23 million people fought on the Eastern Front on the Soviet side alone. In the ongoing war in Ukraine, meanwhile, it’s unlikely that more than three million service members on both sides combined have been deployed.
Precise comparisons are impossible due to the lack of reliable data on deaths in the current war, among other reasons. For Russia, there are at least estimates based on obituaries, burial records, the inheritance registry, and official all-cause mortality statistics (which were still being published until recently). For Ukraine, the available information is far more limited.
Below, we use the most reliable figures that do exist: first, we look at overall losses in the Great Patriotic War for the USSR as a whole and for the Ukrainian SSR, and then we consider military losses specifically. Finally, we compare these numbers with the estimated total and military losses for Russia and Ukraine in the current war.
Despite these caveats, our analysis points to a clear conclusion: Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, for all its brutality — even when adjusted for the size of the forces involved — is not comparable to the Great Patriotic War in terms of the scale of losses.
The Eastern Front of WWII
The USSR’s total losses
Recently, Meduza examined in detail the sources and methodology behind the casualty figure that has become canonical in Soviet and Russian historiography of World War II: 26.6 million dead.
In short, this estimate is derived using the demographic balance method — that is, by calculating the difference between the number of people actually living in the country by the end of 1945 and the number who would have been alive had the war not occurred. This seemingly straightforward definition hides a number of methodological nuances. For example, the figure of 26.6 million explicitly does not account for for the sharp decline in birthrates during the war years, as unborn children cannot be considered war dead. At the same time, this figure does include a small demographic of people who survived the war — those who left the USSR and had not returned by the end of 1945. Their number is estimated at roughly 450,000.
Setting these complexities aside, there are two key things to understand about this estimate. First, it represents the USSR’s total losses, without distinguishing between military and civilian deaths, between different ethnic groups, or between residents of different Soviet republics. Second, it has justifiably become the de facto standard. Since 1991, when the calculation was published in the book The Population of the Soviet Union, 1922–1991 by Yevgeny Andreyev, Leonid Darsky, and Tatyana Kharkova, no fundamentally new data on the subject has emerged — nor could it. All the census data on which the study was based had already been fully analyzed by the authors.
Total losses in the Ukrainian SSR
Ukraine was among the Soviet republics hardest hit by World War II. Millions died under Nazi occupation, and in 1943–1944 the population was mobilized en masse into the Red Army, where many were killed in combat.
Andreyev and his co-authors did not attempt to break losses down by individual Soviet republics; such estimates largely appeared later. For the Ukrainian SSR, the range of demographic loss estimates is much wider than for the USSR as a whole, and there is no single, universally accepted figure.
In our view, the most methodologically rigorous estimate — and the one closest in approach to the work of Andreyev and his colleagues — was produced by a Franco-Ukrainian team of demographers led by Jacques Vallin and Serhii Pyrozhkov. Their article was published in Population Studies in 2002. Using the 1939 and 1959 censuses, they constructed life tables for the 1930s and 1940s. Their analysis took into account prewar and postwar territorial changes in the Ukrainian SSR, sharp spikes in mortality during the famine years (1933 and 1947), and migration flows.
Their conclusion was an estimate of 6.7 million people. This figure represents excess mortality caused by the war of 1941–1945 alone, excluding the decline in birth rates and migration, which they estimated at an additional two million people.
Soviet military losses
While total losses in World War II can only be calculated using demographic balance, military deaths can be estimated through direct counting based on reports from unit commanders — a method known as the accounting-statistical approach. A team of military historians led by Colonel General Grigory Krivosheev undertook to compile and asses these data, using declassified archives of the Soviet Defense Ministry. Their findings were first published in the 1993 book The Secrecy Label Has Been Removed and were later reprinted in subsequent works by Krivosheev and his co-authors.
According to these documents, the irrecoverable losses of the Soviet Armed Forces totaled 8,668,400 people. This number does not include prisoners of war who returned home after the war, or those listed as missing who were later re-drafted into the army on liberated territory — a combined total of 2.775 million people. At the same time, irrecoverable losses do include a group of individuals who survived: prisoners of war who did not return to the USSR and remained in the West.
For comparison with losses in the current war, only part of these irrecoverable losses is relevant — those confirmed killed at the front. The reason is simple: today, we know only the number of Russian service members whose deaths have been officially registered, while the number of those killed but still listed as missing remains unknown (and is at least in the tens of thousands).
In World War II, the number of Soviet military casualties — people who were killed in action, who died of wounds or illness, or who were executed for crimes — was 6,885,100, according to Krivosheev.
Krivosheev’s calculations also include data on the ethnic composition of the dead (under the “nationality” category). Of the Soviet Union’s 8,668,400 irrecoverable losses, 1,377,000 were ethnic Ukrainians. However, this figure does not represent military losses among those conscripted from the territory of the Ukrainian SSR, let alone from the territory of present-day Ukraine. Not all ethnic Ukrainians in the USSR lived in the Ukrainian SSR, just as not everyone living there was ethnically Ukrainian.
Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine
Official data on casualties in Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine are virtually nonexistent.
The Russian Defense Ministry published figures on military deaths only in 2022 — and even then, they were clearly understated. The last such announcement came on September 21, 2022, when then-Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu reported 5,937 killed, without providing any information on wounded soldiers.
Official Ukrainian figures are also limited. The only formal statement came from President Volodymyr Zelensky at a press conference in Kyiv on February 25, 2024. According to him, “31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died in this war.” The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and other official bodies offered no further breakdown, refused to clarify who was included in the count, and did not explain the methodology behind the number. Zelensky’s figure was clearly an underestimate: by that time, the UALosses project — which compiles named lists of fallen soldiers — already contained more than 42,000 Ukrainian servicemen.
In early March 2025, former Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi mentioned “50,000 killed and 300,000 wounded” in a public lecture. By that point, UALosses lists had already grown to include 68,000 names.
Ukraine has not published detailed demographic statistics since February 2022. Only aggregated data for all age groups is available, making it impossible to measure losses among the hardest-hit group: young men. War-related deaths do not show up in overall mortality statistics, unlike, for example, deaths during the coronavirus pandemic.
Russia has also stopped publishing comprehensive mortality data. Operational demographic indicators were suspended in early 2025, and Rosstat later refused to release final statistics for 2024, which had been scheduled for June 2025. As a result, 2023 is the last year for which registered deaths in Russia broken down by age and sex are available. Data for 2022 and 2023 allowed statistician Dmitry Kobak and his co-authors to calculate war-related excess mortality and independently confirm estimates made by Meduza and Mediazona based on the Inheritance Case Registry (ICR). Now, such calculations are no longer possible.
As things stand, only a handful of sources remain to gauge the scale of losses in the current war:
- Lists of soldiers confirmed killed, compiled from obituaries, cemetery photographs, and other sources that document individual deaths. For Russian losses, these lists are maintained by volunteers under the guidance of journalists from Mediazona and BBC News Russian. For Ukrainian losses, they are maintained by the anonymous creators of the UALosses Project.
- Data from the Inheritance Cases Registry, which allows analysts to estimate how complete the confirmed casualty lists are — though only for Russia. No comparable Ukrainian database is publicly accessible. The ICR partially offsets a major limitation of named lists: their completeness is otherwise unknown.
- Civilian casualty data from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. As of November 2025, the UN reported 14,796 deaths and 39,543 injuries on Ukrainian territory. These figures only include cases the UN Monitoring Mission has verified, and the agency emphasizes that the true toll is “likely higher.” Even under ideal conditions, this type of accounting cannot capture all excess mortality caused by war. Deaths resulting from prolonged stress, cold, or lack of medical care, for example, may be substantial but remain invisible without detailed demographic studies — which are almost impossible during active fighting.
How, then, can Ukrainian military losses be estimated under these conditions? The UALosses named lists currently contain 172,000 killed or missing since the invasion began on February 24, 2022. This figure can be treated as a hard minimum.
However, the data is incomplete and the degree of undercounting is unknown. For Russian losses, we were able to assess completeness using the Inheritance Cases Registry; for Ukraine, no comparable method is available.
Still, a rough estimate can be made using the proportion of officers on the named lists. Both Russian and Ukrainian lists include officers: 6,534 for Ukraine (since 2014) and 6,168 for Russia (as of the end of 2025). Officers make up 3.68 percent and 3.94 percent of the total lists, respectively (including those whose rank is unknown), and are the easiest group to identify. If we assume officer losses are proportional to overall losses, and take Russia’s total losses as roughly 280,000 based on inheritance data, this suggests about 290,000 military deaths for Ukraine since 2022.
Taken together, this implies that by the end of 2025, Russia and Ukraine had each likely lost on the order of 300,000 soldiers.
When we discuss figures based on the Inheritance Cases Registry, we refer to confirmed deaths — ones officially recorded with a state-issued death certificate. The situation is different for those killed but still listed as missing. Ukraine maintains an official database for these individuals, but Russia does not. In Russia, a large-scale legal process is underway to have missing servicemen declared dead through the courts, even without a body. Over the past year, more than 90,000 such petitions have been filed.
A final comparison of losses
Based on the sources and analyses discussed above, the most reliable figures are as follows. The USSR’s total losses in the Great Patriotic War amounted to 26.6 million people, of whom 8.7 million were military personnel. Total losses in the Ukrainian SSR, as well as in territories that later became part of independent Ukraine, including Crimea, are estimated at between 6.7 and 7.4 million people. We do not know what share of these losses fell on soldiers drafted from the Ukrainian SSR specifically. What we do know is that:
- 1.38 million ethnic Ukrainians were killed while serving in the Red Army.
- According to calculations by Krivosheev and his co-authors, total irrecoverable losses of the Red Army — killed, captured, or missing — on the territories where the current war is being fought amounted to 1.76 million people.
- Across all battles on the territory of today’s Ukraine, total losses reached 2.7 million people.
In Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, at least 172,000 military personnel and 15,000 civilians have been killed, based on confirmed named lists. This gives a very conservative estimate of Ukraine’s total losses at 187,000. If we assume officer losses are proportional to overall losses, Ukraine’s total deaths rise to roughly 300,000, of whom about 15,000 are civilians.
When comparing overall losses, it is important to note that in addition to the 15,000 civilian deaths recorded by the U.N., there is also excess mortality that is not yet visible. We do not know how many times higher it might be than the confirmed civilian death toll. At the same time, at least 394 civilians have died on Russian territory (as of summer 2025).
Even accounting for these numbers, the human toll is not comparable to the minimum estimate of 6.7 million people killed in the World War II on the territory of today’s Ukraine.
Russian military losses can be assessed more confidently, at least for those officially recorded as dead. By the end of August 2025, roughly 220,000 deaths had been documented in state records. By early 2026, this number had likely approached 280,000 — and this does not include those who were killed but are still listed as missing.
Over the same period during World War II, the Red Army officially lost 6,885,100 soldiers.
What share of soldiers were killed in each war?
The fight between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany was far larger in scale than Russia’s current war in Ukraine. At any given moment, the Soviet side deployed five to six million people across the Eastern Front. By comparison, at its peak, the opposing sides in the current war could field roughly 700,000 to 800,000 troops in the combat zone.
Over the course of the Great Patriotic War (and immediately before it), more than 34 million Soviet citizens were mobilized — over 17 percent of the USSR’s population. According to Krivosheev’s documents, 23 million of them were active service members, directly participating in frontline combat.
For the Ukrainian army in the current war, there is no reliable data on how many people have been mobilized or volunteered.
By contrast, we have relatively reliable figures for the Russian side. The initial invasion force numbered around 150,000 troops, not including Ukrainian citizens mobilized into the Donbas “people’s militias.” In 2022, roughly 45,000 volunteers joined the army. In the fall of 2022, about 300,000 citizens were mobilized. The Wagner private military company recruited around 70,000 people, including 48,000 prisoners. Subsequent campaigns brought in more contract soldiers and volunteers through large financial incentives. By the end of September 2025, just over one million people had been enlisted in this way. In total, roughly 1.6 million people from the Russian side have been sent to the front — about 14 times fewer than during World War II.
Since we know both the number of people who passed through the Soviet and Russian armies and the number killed in action, we can compare the intensity of combat by looking at the ratio of deaths to the number of soldiers who fought. For the Ukrainian army, reliable figures don’t currently exist. In the Great Patriotic War, roughly 30 percent of soldiers sent to the front were killed. In the Russia–Ukraine war, the corresponding figure for Russian forces is 13.7 percent.
The war between the USSR and Nazi Germany was not only larger in scale but also far more intense. Soldiers’ chances of survival were much lower.
These differences are evident when comparing Red Army operations in 1943 with Russian operations in Ukraine and Russian border regions in 2024–2025. While the geography and types of operations are similar, the overall outcomes are vastly different.
- In 1943, four Soviet fronts with an average combined strength of over two million soldiers conducted multiple major operations: they launched an unsuccessful offensive on Kharkiv, defended southern Kursk and Belgorod, and later advanced in Donbas and the Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia regions. In the process, they lost over 360,000 soldiers killed or missing in action, but advanced 200–400 kilometers (124–248 miles) along various sectors.
- By contrast, the Russian grouping, averaging around 700,000 troops, also launched an unsuccessful offensive on Kharkiv, mounted a defense in Kursk and Belgorod, and advanced in Donbas and the Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia regions. Their losses were roughly 200,000 killed, and their rate of advance was only 50–75 kilometers (31–46 miles) along the main axes in Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk — over two years, compared with just half a year in 1943.
The difference is not the size of the armies or the intensity of combat. In the current war, even with looser formations (troop density three times lower than in 1943) and lower fire density, maneuver warfare is effectively impossible. Reconnaissance drones have “dispersed the fog of war,” making concentration of forces and a deep breakthroughs virtually impossible.
How many people were displaced in each war?
While the human losses in the two wars are fundamentally different, one demographic measure allows a meaningful comparison: the number of people forced to flee their homes. By this measure, the displacement resulting from the Russia–Ukraine war is even larger in scale than that of Great Patriotic War.
The contrast is particularly striking in the first year of each conflict. According to UNHCR data, by the end of 2022, at least 7.9 million people had been forced to leave Ukraine. In the first year of the USSR’s fight against the Nazis, the comparable figure — the net balance of emigration and immigration — was roughly half that: 3.78 million people. These 1940s migration figures come from Jacques Vallin and Serhii Pyrozhkov, who relied on a wide range of early studies. As elsewhere in their work, these numbers cover not only the Ukrainian SSR but the entire territory that later became independent Ukraine.
By the end of 2025, the U.N. reported that 5.86 million people were still living outside Ukraine because of the war. Most are temporarily residing in the European Union, primarily in Poland and Germany, while over half a million are outside Europe altogether.
Some of these refugees will return after the war, but many will not. The current displacement will have a lasting impact on Ukraine’s demographics. Researchers consider a range of scenarios possible. For example, a 2023 study by Philipp Iffing and other researchers estimated that after hostilities end, between 50 percent (in a pessimistic “long war” scenario) and 80 percent (in more optimistic scenarios) of the nearly eight million people who fled Ukraine in the first year of Moscow’s full-scale invasion would return. Some have already come back, as reflected in declining refugee numbers, but even in the best-case scenario, the number of people who permanently leave the country will exceed one million.
Comparing the economic impact
World War II was a period of maximum strain for the countries involved. At the height of the fighting, nations devoted more than half of their gross domestic product (GDP) to the war effort — covering weapons production, army upkeep, and military logistics — even after accounting for allied assistance.
In the current war, this level of mobilization exists only in Ukraine. Its economy resembles the wartime Soviet Union: nearly all resources are directed toward the conflict, and support from allies is crucial. Without it, sustaining resistance would be extremely difficult. Both wars also saw production decline due to enemy occupation, infrastructure destruction, and the diversion of a large portion of the population — soldiers in the army and civilians displaced as refugees — away from the economy. Meanwhile, the opposing side — Germany in World War II, Russia today — continued to see economic growth for the first three years of fighting.
In 2024, Ukraine spent more than half of its GDP on the war effort. Direct military assistance from allies accounted for 22 percent of GDP — roughly $42 billion — with another 27 percent flowing to the Ukrainian budget as broader Western aid. In other words, Ukraine’s economy is heavily dependent on outside support.
Russia, by contrast, spent just 7.1 percent of GDP on military expenditures in 2024. While this is double its prewar 2021 level, it remains far below the wartime spending seen in World War II. For Ukraine’s allies, the war has been relatively manageable: in 1943, the U.S. sent aid equivalent to six percent of GDP, whereas in 2024, aid to Ukraine was only a fraction of a percent of its supporters’ GDP.
In absolute terms, however, Russia’s military spending exceeds that of Ukraine and its allies combined: $150.5 billion versus $108.8 billion. This gives Moscow some battlefield advantage, but the gap is not large enough to allow the Kremlin to secure a decisive victory in a war of attrition.