February 10, 2025

Athens News

News in English from Greece

ISW: results 2024 and forecast for 2025


The Institute for the Study of War summed up the results of the war in Ukraine over the past year and gave a forecast for 2025.

Last year, Russian troops conquered 4,168 square kilometers, including “mostly fields and small settlements in Ukraine and the Kursk region,” analysts note. At the same time, the Russian army lost 427 thousand troops, says a new report from the American ISW:

“Russian military commanders have largely prioritized efforts to capture the rest of the Donetsk region and create a buffer zone in the north of the Kharkiv region in 2024, but have failed to achieve these goals. According to Western and Ukrainian sources, Russia planned to capture the entire territory of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions by the end of 2024. However, the slow advance of Russian troops in early and mid-2024 forced the Russian military command to reassess its plans and identify the capture of Pokrovsk as the main offensive objective by the end of the year.”

The Institute for the Study of War recalled in its report:

“Russian troops captured four medium-sized settlements throughout 2024 – Avdeevka, Selidovo, Ugledar and Kurakhovo. The largest of them numbered more than 31 thousand people of the pre-war population. However, in December, the progress of Russian troops slowed down. It will take Russian forces just over two years to capture the rest of the Donetsk region, with the pace of progress until 2024. And this is possible if we assume that all Russian offensives will be limited to the Donetsk region, and that they will be able to capture large urban areas as easily as small villages and fields.”

At the same time, the institute’s analysts are convinced:

“To implement such plans, the Ukrainian Armed Forces still have to stop Russian troops from advancing in their priority sectors. Therefore, Western assistance remains critical to Ukraine’s ability to stabilize the front line in 2025.”

Russia and Ukraine provide almost no information about their losses in the war. Moscow officially named the number of those killed for the last time in September 2022 – then they announced 5,937 dead. Kyiv did not do this for a long time, declaring that the data would be disclosed after the war. On December 8, President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky reported that since the beginning of a full-scale war, Ukraine has lost 43 thousand military personnel killed and 370 thousand injured. According to him, the losses of the Russian Federation exceed 750 thousand – 198 thousand dead and more than 550 thousand wounded.

Since the beginning of 2024, Russia has lost another 421 thousand military personnel in Ukraine, said the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Alexander Syrsky. The head of the Pentagon said on December 7 that Russia lost at least 700 thousand troops during the large-scale war against Ukraine and spent more than $200 billion on it.

In Crimea and Sevastopol, funerals of Russian military personnel killed in the war against Ukraine are held almost daily. December 19, editorial office of Krym.Realii (Radio Liberty project) published the GRUZ-200 database with the first thousand identified Crimeans who fought in the Russian army and died in Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The list contains information about their place of birth, place of conscription or recruitment into the Russian army (including the actual military unit), and also, for some of the dead, the exact or approximate place and date of death.



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