1,000 days of war. The numbers of Russia’s full‑scale invasion in Ukraine

In the morning of February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin announced what he called a “special military operation”—a term the Kremlin still uses to describe the war it unleashed against Ukraine.

Immediately after Putin’s speech, Russia launched a massive missile strike on Ukrainian regions, and the military began an offensive in several directions simultaneously. A few days before the invasion, Putin had recognized two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine—Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics—as independent states. Although at the time the separatists controlled a smaller part of the actual Ukrainian Donets and Luhansk regions. But Russian forces didn’t stop there. They invaded multiple Ukrainian regions: Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kherson, Sumy, Chernihiv, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv, and Odesa. While many Ukrainian cities fell under Russian control at first, Ukraine’s military later succeeded in liberating many of them.

The Kremlin claimed this “special military operation” would “denazify” and “demilitarize” Ukraine. From day one, this also meant shelling residential buildings and killing civilians. In areas they occupied, Russian forces unleashed real terror. They kidnapped, raped and murdered people. They looted homes and set up filtration camps and torture chambers. Many Ukrainian towns and villages were razed to the ground in the fighting.

The Bucha massacre, airstrikes on both a hospital and theatre in Mariupol, attacks on the Kramatorsk railway station and the shopping mall in Kremenchuk—these are just some of the Russian army’s worst atrocities. Since the invasion began, Ukrainian prosecutors have opened nearly 150,000 cases related to war crimes.

According to the United Nations, over 12,000 civilians have died in Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion. This is from their November 2024 assessment. Another 27,000 people have been wounded. The UN monitoring mission notes that civilian casualties have been rising since July 2024.

These figures don’t tell the whole story. They only account for cases that human rights defenders could verify. We still don’t know how many people died during intense fighting in many parts of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, which Russia now occupies.

Ukraine’s Prosecutor General reports that 592 children have died from Russian attacks. Nearly 1,700 more were injured. Just last week, in Kryvyi Rih, 32-year-old Elena and her three childrien—Kyrylo, 10, Demyd, 2, and 2-month-old Ulyana—died as a result of a Russian air strike.

Russia now occupies almost 18% of Ukraine, according to late October OSINT analysis by WarMapper. This includes Crimea, which Russia took in 2014, and the self-proclaimed republics in Luhansk and Donetsk. But most of these territories were seized after the 2022 invasion, when Russia gained control over most of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, along with large parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

Ukraine has managed to liberate significant territory. Early in the war, Ukrainian forces pushed Russia out of the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions. Later, they recaptured Kherson—the only regional capital Russia had managed to seize since February 2022.

According to Ukraine’s ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets, 14,000 Ukrainian civilians are being held captive. This number, reported last summer, includes people captured by Russian forces in annexed Crimea and the “People’s Republics” since 2014.

Getting civilians out of captivity is extremely difficult. Ukraine has been forced to trade captured Russian soldiers to free civilians—something that goes against international humanitarian law. Civilians shouldn’t be held captive at all. Take Lenie Umerova, a Crimean Tatar who finally came home this September after nearly two years in Russian prison. She was arrested on espionage charges in December 2022 while traveling to visit her seriously ill father in Simferopol, Crimea.

Ukrainian journalist Viktoria Roshchyna, detained by Russian forces in occupied Berdyansk, died while being transported from a detention center in Taganrog, where she spent her final six months. Human rights defenders say this facility is notorious for torture. Former Ukrainian prisoners describe being beaten with rubber batons and wooden hammers, and shocked with tasers. Russian prisoners have also reported torture at this facility.

Since the invasion began, there have been 58 prisoner exchanges between Russia and Ukraine. The most recent happened on October 19, when 95 people returned to Ukraine, the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War reported. This exchange was particularly significant because it included many Ukrainians who had been sentenced in Russian courts—28 had received extremely long sentences, and 20 were facing life in prison.

The New York Times reports that Russia still holds about 8,000 Ukrainian service members. According to Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters, 3,767 people have made it home so far, mostly military personnel.

According to Danielle Bell, the head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, more than 95 percent of Ukrainian military personnel are tortured in Russian captivity: “They are tortured from the very first interrogations. They are beaten with metal sticks, tortured with electricity. This is the worst thing I have seen in my 20-year career.”

For example, in late July news came about the death of Ukrainian PoW Oleksandr Ishchenko, who had served as a driver in the Azov brigade and was held by Russia the Rostov pre-trial detention centre. The commander of the unit, Svyatoslav Palamar, wrote that Ishchenko died as a result of chest trauma, a conclusion reached by a Ukrainian forensic medical expert, who also found multiple fractures in the PoW’s ribs. Forensic experts in Russia claimed that they were unable to determine the cause of Ishchenko’s death due to ‘putrefactive changes.’

Seventy seven thousand one hundred and forty three Russian soldiers. That’s how many we’ve confirmed dead in Ukraine—and we know each of their names. We maintain this list together with BBC’s Russian Service and a team of volunteers, confirming each death through multiple sources.

For many months, the largest losses category were volunteers. “Spare people,” in the words of State Duma deputy and former DPR Alexander Borodai: “old men” and “weaklings” who aren’t expected to achieve “even the smallest victory.” These recruits are armed with outdated, limited equipment, with their primary task being “to exhaust the enemy to the max.”

Beyond our named count, Mediazona also calculates the estimate of the total Russian deaths at war—our latest figure, as of July 2024, stands at over 120,000. This estimate is based on a complex analysis of the excess mortality data from Russia’s Probate Registry.

The war has led to mass desertion. Russian courts have handled 12,867 cases of soldiers going AWOL since mobilisation began—that’s as of November 12, 2024.

After that, the military banned personnel from leaving service, and parliament toughened penalties for military offenses. Thousands of Russian soldiers have refused to fight. Early in the war, they could relatively easily leave the front and return home. But commanders soon cracked down on refusers—threatening them, throwing them into makeshift prisons, the so-called “pits”, in occupied territories, or forcing them back to the front.

Once these new military laws took effect, soldiers could no longer refuse to fight without facing charges. The number of cases spiked. The most common “crime” is AWOL—nearly 13,000 such cases have reached the courts by mid-November. Several hundred more face charges of desertion or disobeying orders. But getting charged doesn’t mean escaping the war. On the contrary: courts typically hand down suspended sentences, which lets commanders send these soldiers right back to the front.

Just days after the invasion, the Kremlin introduced new laws targeting anti-war Russians, with penalties up to 15 years in prison for contradicting the Defense Ministry’s position—now called “public dissemination of knowingly false information” (or “fake news”) about the military. That includes reporting on or just publicly discussing Bucha and other atrocities.

Russians face prosecution for simply sharing posts and videos about attacks on Ukrainian cities or civilian deaths. No one is safe from these charges—ordinary citizens, politicians, activists, journalists, even former police officers and war veterans.

The first prison sentence for “fake news” about the army went to Alexei Gorinov, a 63-year-old Moscow district deputy. In July 2022, he got seven years in prison for speaking out against the war at a council meeting. In court, he said: “Russia exhausted its limit for wars in the 20th century. Yet here we are—Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel. Do these names mean anything to you? To you, the prosecution! Take an interest and don’t say later that you didn’t know anything. For five months Russia has been conducting military actions, shamefully calling them a special operation.” His health has severely deteriorated in prison, according to his supporters.

Just last week, we saw another shocking case. Nadezhda Buyanova, a 68-year-old doctor from Moscow, received five and a half years in prison. Her crime? The ex-wife of a soldier killed in Ukraine claimed the doctor told her son his father was “a legitimate target for Ukraine” during an appointment. Buyanova was found guilty despite no evidence and the accuser’s constantly changing testimony.

As of today, 356 people are prosecuted on “fake news” charges, according to OVD-Info. Russia aslo created two new laws against “discrediting” the armed forces. First offense brings administrative charges, but repeat it within a year and you face criminal prosecution. Even saying “No to war” can get you arrested.

Authorities use other charges too—“justifying terrorism” for commenting on attacks against pro-war figures, “rehabilitating Nazism” for comparing Russia to Nazi Germany, and sometimes even treason. All in all, over a thousand people have faced prosecution for opposing the war.

For 105 days now, Ukraine has held part of Russia’s Kursk region. It began on the night of August 6, when Ukrainian forces advanced into Russian territory. The defense—border guards, FSB units, and a small military force including conscripts—was overwhelmed by the attack.

Dozens of settlements fell under Ukrainian control, including the town of Sudzha. The Kremlin stayed silent about this advance for days. Putin dismissed it as “yet another massive provocation,” and the Defense Ministry waited until August 9 to admit there was fighting “on the western outskirts of Sudzha.

Meanwhile, residents had to flee the combat zone on their own, with some dying under shelling. “Home is no longer an option,” one of the Sudzha residents said. “We left all our belongings behind. We left our pets, thinking we would return. Now, artillery and tank shelling continues; enemy troops sit in the forest belts, firing at incoming cars; roads and fields are mined.”

Kursk refugees struggled to find housing, and by early November, they were recording desperate video appeals to Putin for help. When Sudzha residents held a protest in central Kursk, authorities labeled it an illegal protest.

Speaking about these events, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy emphasized his country doesn’t want Russian territory. “The Kursk operation,” he said, “is part of a larger military and diplomatic strategy. Everything we’re doing aims to push Russia toward a fair peace.”

Editor: Maria Klimova