Has Russia suffered a million casualties in the Ukraine war?
More or Less: Behind the Stats
BBC
4.6 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 28 June 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It’s been over three years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the human toll is growing on both sides.
Recently, politicians and journalists have declared a grim milestone, one million Russian casualties.
But is this number accurate?
Tim talks to Seth Jones, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Olga Ivshina, from the BBC Russian service, to investigate this statistic.
If you’ve seen a number in the news you think we should take a look at, email the More or Less team: [email protected]
Presenter: Tim Harford Producer: Nicholas Barrett Series producer: Tom Colls Production co-ordinator: Brenda Brown Sound mix: Gareth Jones Editor: Richard Vadon
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, podcast fan. |
| 0:03.0 | Consider this your invite to the UK's biggest podcasting party. |
| 0:06.7 | We're heading to Sheffield from the 4th to the 6th of July |
| 0:09.0 | for the BBC Sounds Fringe at the Crossed Wires Festival. |
| 0:12.8 | We'll be joined by some of the biggest names in podcasting, |
| 0:15.3 | including Sarah Cox, Charlie Hedges, Russell Kane, |
| 0:18.4 | and some bloke called Greg James doing his Radio 4 show called Rewinder. |
| 0:23.2 | You can watch live shows of your favourite podcasts, and the best part is free. |
| 0:28.1 | To book your free tickets, go to crossedwires.org-slash fringe. |
| 0:33.0 | Hello, and thanks for downloading the more or less podcast. |
| 0:36.5 | We're the program that looks at the numbers in the news and in life. |
| 0:39.4 | And I'm Tim Harford. |
| 0:44.5 | The war in Ukraine has been grinding on since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, with a huge human toll on both sides. |
| 1:02.0 | Recently, politicians and journalists have been emphasising the scale of losses, specifically for Russia. Here's the UK's Foreign Secretary, David Lamy. |
| 1:05.0 | Putin's barbaric ambition has caused untold harm on Ukraine and its people. But Putin is stealing Russia's future too. |
| 1:14.6 | Now a million Russian casualties and counting. |
| 1:18.6 | The figure of one million casualties has also been tweeted out |
| 1:23.6 | by the president of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky. But with Russia keeping their |
| 1:29.4 | casualty numbers secret, how can we be sure about this figure? |
| 1:37.4 | One of the organisations that has been using the million casualties figure is the Centre |
| 1:42.8 | for Strategic and International Studies, |
| 1:45.6 | a Washington-based think tank. I asked Seth Jones, the president of their Defense and Security |
... |
Transcript will be available on the free plan in 25 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.