NATO official: Russia lost more than 50,000 soldiers in September
According to Bloomberg, a NATO official put Russian losses in September at over 50,000, including more than 28,000 killed – the highest monthly total this year. The figures cannot be verified.
Symbolic image · Photo: Vyacheslav Argenberg / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0 (cropped and resized)
Russia's army lost more than 50,000 personnel in September, including upwards of 28,000 soldiers killed on the battlefield, according to an unnamed NATO official. Bloomberg reported this on Sunday, the Kyiv Independent said. It would be the highest monthly total of 2026. The figure closely matches the estimate of Ukraine's General Staff, which put Russian personnel losses in September at 46,230 without saying how many were fatal. The NATO official said Ukraine's armed forces suffered 5,000 casualties in the same month; the Kyiv Independent could not verify this.
According to General Staff data, monthly Russian losses have risen sharply since the start of the year: from 31,710 in January to 46,230 in September, an increase of nearly 46 percent. In January, then-Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov set the goal to "kill 50,000 Russians per month". He argued at the time that losses on that scale could undermine Moscow's ability to sustain the war.
In total, the General Staff put Russian personnel losses since February 2022 at 1,552,840 as of Oct. 11, a figure presumed to include killed, wounded, captured and missing soldiers. These figures cannot be independently verified, and Moscow does not publish comprehensive casualty data. According to Ukrainian intelligence, Russia's General Staff is prepared to mobilise around 300,000 people in 2026 and another 300,000 in 2027 if needed.