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The head of the UK’s intelligence agency says Russia has lost nearly half a million troops since the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Getting into it: Speaking in a rare public address, GCHQ director Anne Keast-Butler said, “Putin is going backwards on the battlefield, with new intelligence showing that almost half a million Russian soldiers have been killed since the conflict began.” The figure is significant because it’s the highest on-the-record estimate of Russian military deaths offered by any government (outside of Ukraine) since the war started, and it’s roughly double the 250,000 figure that then-MI6 chief cited back in September.

Neither Russia nor Ukraine releases its own casualty data, though a long-running tally by BBC News and the outlet Mediazona has so far confirmed the names of more than 223,000 dead Russian troops, a number researchers believe represents only part of the total.

Despite this, Russia tells a very different story. Back in December, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed Ukrainian military casualties had “long since exceeded one million” amid what he called a “general frontline collapse,” while Russian Defense Ministry data cited by state media has put Ukraine’s losses even higher.

Those figures are widely disputed and impossible to independently verify, and Kyiv’s own accounting is far lower, with President Zelensky saying earlier this year that Ukraine had lost around 55,000 soldiers since 2022.

This all comes as analysts at the Institute for the Study of War recently assessed that the momentum of the fighting is “shifting in favor of Ukrainian forces, at least for now.”