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Russian battlefield losses in Ukraine hit their worst monthly total of the war in March, driven almost entirely by Ukrainian drone strikes.

Some shit you should know before you dig in: Since the war in Ukraine broke out, both Russia and Ukraine have been shady about posting accurate casualty figures, making it difficult to get a clear picture of what’s actually happening on the ground. What we do know comes mostly from Ukrainian and Russian military reporting and independent estimates. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov claimed back in December that Ukrainian military casualties exceeded one million, though that figure has not been independently verified. Back in 2024, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said 43,000 Ukrainian troops were killed and around 380,000 were wounded since 2022 (numbers that many defense analysts questioned).

What’s going on now: Ukraine’s armed forces reported 35,351 Russian casualties in March, a 29% jump from February and slightly above the previous record set in December. Drones accounted for 96% of those losses, with Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskii saying Ukrainian forces conducted 11,000 drone sorties per day and struck over 151,000 targets in March alone (a 50% increase from February). Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said each strike was documented. “These are clearly confirmed losses: we have video footage of each such strike in our system,” he said.

The numbers are adding up in ways that are starting to stress Russia’s ability to fight. Ukraine’s “I Want to Live” surrender hotline found that the Kremlin was bringing in around 940 new contract soldiers daily through the first three months of 2026, a pace that falls well short of what’s needed to reach Russia’s annual recruitment goal of 409,000. At that rate, Russia would finish the year about 65,000 soldiers short of its target.

According to Ukraine’s General Staff, total Russian combat losses since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022 now stand at approximately 1,298,730, a figure that includes killed, wounded, missing, and captured. Meanwhile, the rate of Russian territorial gains is slowing, from nearly 5 square miles per day at the end of 2024 to around 2 square miles per day this year.

Civilians are also paying a steep price. The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission reported at least 211 civilians killed and 1,206 injured in Ukraine in March alone, a 49% spike from February. Short-range drone attacks caused the highest number of deaths, killing 66 people. UN mission head Danielle Bell said front-line areas are “extremely dangerous” for civilians, with half of those killed in those regions last month being elderly.

This all comes as Zelenskyy has been pushing for a monthly Russian casualty figure of 50,000, a threshold he has described as the point at which Russian forces would begin to deteriorate beyond recovery. Ukraine’s defense ministry said the country is “confidently moving towards” that goal.